I feel somewhat shattered at the loss of Elijah Cummings. Dan Rodricks in his hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun:

“We are better than this.”

Elijah Cummings said that over and over again, urging his fellow Americans and his fellow Baltimoreans to believe it — and to be it.

The U.S. congressman from Maryland, who died early Thursday morning at 68, was a long-time warrior for justice, truly a great man. He spoke truth to power even as a member of the power class. And the Democrat was not above pleading, with rival Republicans or constituents, for what he knew was right.

He chose politics and public life because he wanted a better country, a better city. Immersed in the complex problems of both, he kept his eyes on the prize all through his career. As a member of Congress, with oversight of government operations at a range of levels, Cummings was in the role of examiner, and what he examined was usually bad — from incompetence by bureaucrats to price gouging by corporations to the abuses of power of the executive branch. And so his words were often aspirational, uttered while mired in mud, yet pointing us toward a mountaintop.

He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he did not want.

He did not want the children of migrants separated from their parents at the border. “We are better than this,” he said.

He wanted the president to be civil, courageous, kind and honest. He wanted the president to abide by the Constitution.

“We are better than this. We really are,” Cummings said in February, after Michael Cohen described his sordid undertakings as the president’s one-time lawyer. “As a country, we are so much better than this.”