Dave McCormick won’t listen to my advice. You don’t become as rich as he is listening to journalists. But you might become a better public servant listening to some people who look at politics from the outside and understand it as a higher calling than the work of buying and trading (of power, influence, other goodies, and some good-doing) it is for too many of his future peers.
Here is the advice I would give him. Which is basically: For the sake of the state you will represent, and for your own sake as well, you must start your service as a U.S. senator by saying no to someone who can hurt you for saying no and would enjoy doing it.
Advice for Mr. McCormick
Dear soon to be new senator:
You must start as you mean to go on, as the old adage goes. You even more than the rest of us, because you must make big unavoidable decisions of principle at the very beginning of your new work.
What you decide to do will tell us what sort of senator you mean to be. And I think, not to raise the stakes, what sort of man you are, and how much, even whether, we can trust you to do the right thing in the future.
Donald Trump, the head of your party and a man who got more votes in this state than you did, is forcing you — at the beginning of your tenure — to vote on several cabinet nominees whose unsuitability can be seen from Pluto. The office to which the people of Pennsylvania have elected you has the high Constitutional duty to “advise and consent,” or not, to their taking office.
You cannot with integrity say yes.
To take the most egregious example, Matt Gaetz. Gaetz should not be attorney general of the United States.
A man of his morals, exemplified but not exhausted in his treatment of women, a man so self-serving, so contemptuous of the way things are meant to be done and so careless of the distinctions government and law depend upon, a man to whom the words “judicious” and “thoughtful” and “objective” could never be applied, cannot serve as the nation’s chief legal authority.
All you have to decide
I believe you know this. I can’t believe that you, being the man you are, the man who in some of his commercials invoked his West Point values, doesn’t see this. How long would Gaetz have lasted at West Point before being drummed out? Six minutes?
Would you have been his friend? Would you have appointed him to any position of trust or responsibility? Wouldn’t you have worked to keep him out of such positions?
The same founders who gave to you and your peers the crucial — the possibly nation-changing — power to advise and consent (or not) would have turned down the Matt Gaetz of their day, were George Washington so bad a man as to nominate him. Flawed as they were (the slave-owning, Jefferson’s exploitation of Sally Hemings), they understood the law and the character needed to fairly and dispassionately administer it.
It’s not your fault that voting against Gaetz and his peers will put you on the president’s excrement-list. It’s not your fault that the president-elect will treat your vote as a test of loyalty.
But few of us get to choose the circumstances in which our characters will be challenged. We can only do the right thing or the wrong thing.
If you’ll forgive a reference to a profound work of moral philosophy presented in a story: After hearing how the world became as bad as it is, a younger, naive character says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” His much older and wiser friend responds: "So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
You’re in the same place as Frodo and Gandalf were in “The Lord of the Rings.”
Ambition and character
You’re an ambitious man, and I don’t mean that critically. If you want to do the good in the world you say you want to do as a senator, you must be ambitious, or your won’t be a senator.
But character matters more, because it determines who you will be and what you will do hereafter, and character plays hell with ambition, and it plays hell with ambition’s enablers confusion, ambiguity and compromise. It blocks out the tempter’s voice that tells you that you must give in now, fully, to do good things some time in the future.
Who is honored more? In whose action does our common moral sense see the ideal, the act to be emulated? The crowd praising the naked king for his wonderful clothes, or the boy who stood up and told the truth?
That’s your choice, Mr. McCormick. Please, please make the right one. Be the Republican on the Senate floor who stands up and says no.
David Mills’ previous column was “We can't trust the stories we're told.”
First Published: November 20, 2024, 11:56 p.m.
Updated: November 21, 2024, 12:46 a.m.
