Sunday, Oct. 27, 2019 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
Did America bury its decency, honor and morality with Congressman Elijah Cummings this week?
It can’t be lost on anybody the stature of Cummings and the powerful lessons of his life, such that he was honored by his country and his colleagues this past week when he became the first African-American lawmaker to lie in state at Statuary Hall in the Capitol.
To listen to his colleagues, Republican and Democratic, and to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on Friday at his funeral, it was clear that Cummings was a giant of a man who was the moral backbone of the Congress. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that Cummings was a leader who — like the prophet whose name he shared — “saw wrongdoing and spent his life working to banish it from our land.”
I couldn’t help but contrast how Cummings epitomized the quintessential American values of morality, decency and honor — a fact confirmed by all who knew him from across the political, social and economic spectrums — to what we heard last week in a U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
Candidate Donald Trump in 2016 infamously boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose a voter. “
To most Americans that sounded absurd at the time and just some more bluster from a candidate well-known for bluster. The country has since learned that Trump was closer to right about how the cult-like slavishness that has enthralled some Americans, generally, and almost the entire Republican Senate and Congress, specifically, has gripped the body politic.
But this past week we heard this nonsense taken to an entirely new level, one that should alarm every American who still remembers — and the younger ones who should have learned — what makes America so special.
What the country will remember about Congressman Elijah Cummings, besides his incredible story of growing from nowhere to the epitome of public service, is this man whose “voice could shake mountains” lived a life committed to honor, morality and decency toward all Americans.
But if what happened in that courtroom last week is an indication of where we are going as a country, then I am afraid we are all in for a difficult time.
There was an argument in the Court of Appeals — that’s right beneath the Supreme Court of the United States — during which an issue arose challenging the concept that no man is above the law, something we Americans inherited and have embraced from Mother England that was embodied in the Magna Carta! Yes, that idea is what we call “age-old.”
A judge asked President Trump’s lawyer whether he was suggesting that Trump could actually shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and, because he is the president, actually get away with murder. To which the lawyer answered, “yes.” As long as he was our president!
What alarmed me is the argument went from the ridiculousness of the candidate’s bluster about which very few Americans took seriously, to the seriousness of the question from an appeals court judge who got the same response from Trump’s lawyer.
And he was deadly serious.
Whether the lawyer believed what he was saying is a different question, but for the first time that I can recall the idea that no man is above the law is being seriously challenged.
And what I haven’t heard since then is a peep from anyone who just a few days ago had been extolling the virtues of Elijah Cummings. Some of the very same people who spoke of Cumming’s honor and decency and impeccable moral code, a man who knew in his heart that no man was or could ever be above the law, have been silent in the face of such an attack on the very core belief of this democracy.
And what about the rest of America?
Did we bury our own sense of honor, our own morality and our own belief in the rule of law in this country with Elijah Cummings?
I sure hope not. But the silence from those who should be screaming has been deafening.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun
