Andy Kim battles his own party in fight against corruption

“Independence means being able to investigate and act without fear of reprisal,” Sen. Andy Kim said Monday during a five-hour hearing. “What we have come to see here in New Jersey must be fixed, and the people demand it.”

Kim—a Democrat serving in the US Senate—was speaking at the New Jersey state capitol against a bill that seeks to remove most of the state comptroller’s watchdog authority and transfer it to a separate state agency tasked with investigating corruption in government spending. That latter agency, called the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, has been the subject of its own scandals.

Since the comptroller is appointed by the governor and can’t be removed from office by state lawmakers, the comptroller can conduct independent investigations. But Kim told Mother Jones that the new bill would give the state legislature more control, as they would be able to fire any employee of the combined anti-corruption body at will. 

“There is no effort to try to insulate the people doing this work from political ramifications,” Kim said. 

The bill advanced through the committee in a unanimous 5-0 vote. Kim’s efforts to push back represent an increasingly rare example of a US senator taking a stand against the power structure in his own party.

Kim’s political story has been built around opposition to the ossified corruption of the New Jersey Democratic Party. The senator won his seat in 2024 after announcing a primary challenge against Sen. Bob Menendez, who was facing corruption and bribery charges (not for the first time). Menendez ultimately withdrew from the race, and Kim beat back a challenge from Tammy Murphy, the wife of the current governor. In doing so, Kim waged a fight to abolish “county-line” primary ballots in the state, whose design unfairly grants electoral advantage to candidates with party endorsements. In New Jersey’s 2025 gubernatorial election, respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll ranked government ethics as the second most pressing issue behind taxes.

Kim says that the Monday hearing was an example of the state’s entrenched corruption. According to the New York Times, he arrived in Trenton at around 9 a.m. and was one of the first people to request to speak. But he was the last to deliver his testimony. The committee’s chairman, New Jersey state Sen. Jim Beach, a fellow Democrat, gave Kim three minutes to speak. 

“Sir, I have been here for five-and-a-half hours,” Kim said.

“So has everyone else,” Beach responded. “Why do you think you’re special? You’re not.”

Kim decried the effort to jam the bill through the legislature just after Thanksgiving—an attempt, he said, to fast-track it in a lame duck session before the state’s governor-elect, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, comes into office. Like Kim, Sherrill campaigned on a commitment to government efficiency and transparency.

For Kim, the fight is illustrative of a larger disconnect between voters and legislators. 

“Three million people showed up to vote a couple of weeks ago, overwhelmingly wanting to vote on issues related to affordability and cost-of-living,” Kim told Mother Jones. “Why aren’t those the bills that they’re taking on right now, rather than the effort to gut watchdog agencies and accountability?” 

Kim also connects this largely intra-party dispute to the Democrats’ higher-profile fight against the Trump administration, asserting Democrats can’t effectively argue that they are fighting a corrupt federal government if they are weakening anti-corruption protections in their own states. 

Kim likes to describe this combination of problems as a “corruption tax” on the American people, raising the cost-of-living even higher with the gutting of essential government programs like Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. 

For Nicholas Scutari, the Democratic Senate president and author of the bill that Kim opposes, defanging the state agency is part of making it easier to sniff out corruption, not harder. “If there’s real corruption, we want to root it out, and that’s why we want to reinvigorate a powerful state independent agency — not one that’s appointed by the executive,” he told the New York Times.

Kim argues that the best way to achieve transparency in New Jersey would be to empower both the State Commission of Investigation and comptroller’s office with more resources. He also supports a proposal to re-establish a public advocate position in the state and wants to reverse recent legislation, including a bill that gutted New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act. Kim is also seeking a final court ruling banning the state’s county-line election ballots. 

But Kim also works in what he calls “broken-machine politics.” When questioned about Sherrill’s refusal to comment on the bill to consolidate the watchdogs, he deflected. 

“I’m going to focus on those that have the votes and the ability to stop this piece of legislation right now,” Kim told Mother Jones. “We’ll have plenty of time to engage Gov.-elect Sherrill in terms of the kind of administration she’s going to build.” 

Kim said that he and Sherrill have talked “at length” about addressing government transparency.

But he hopes that he is able to demonstrate consistency to voters. Fighting corruption within the Democratic Party is part of what resistance against the Trump administration looks like. He said as much to Mother Jones, citing what he said during his speech following his Senate seat win: “I will not let the job change me. I will work to change the job.”