Elijah Cummings: a righteous man who believed in a better America, a better Baltimore

"We have to guard the democracy," Cummings said. "If we had a Democrat as president, who owned 111 companies in 18 countries, I'd go to that president and say, 'Look, you gotta deal with this.'"

Cummings wanted Republicans to help him convince Trump to recognize the law, to divest, to rise to the ethical demands of the presidency — to, essentially, be “better than this.”

"I want to be very careful about this and approach it in a bipartisan way,” he told me. “I want to include Republicans and Democrats."

But, of course, that did not happen. The super-partisanship of Congress long frustrated him, especially when he believed Republicans on the oversight committee were abusing their investigative powers to embarrass and harass Obama administration officials.

In 2014, during a hearing on the practices of the Internal Revenue Service, Cummings challenged an abrupt adjournment by Darrell Issa, the committee’s Republican chairman. Issa rudely cut off Cummings’ microphone. I was listening in my car when it happened, and Cummings’ booming voice echoed in the hearing room. He continued to address the hearing and he was incredulous that Issa would shut off his microphone.

“We are better than this!” Cummings shouted.

Back home in Baltimore, he was just as aspirational. Baltimore could be so much better than it is, he said, if we could just get the schools up to speed, just get more kids into summer jobs, find employment for ex-offenders coming home from prison. He sponsored job fairs every year. He used to call me to suggest subjects for the column, and they were always about people or programs that were already quietly trying to make Baltimore a better city.

As you might imagine, his tone was profoundly sad when we spoke of the violence in the city and the loss of young lives, in particular. "I've often said that our children are the living messages we send to a future we will never see,” he said. “But now our children are sending us to a future they will never see. There's something wrong with that picture."

He repeated those words at Freddie Gray’s funeral in April of 2015, a tense and depressing time in Baltimore. On the day of the west-side rioting, and the days following, Cummings was on the streets, talking to hundreds of people, reminding them that we are better than this.

In recent years, of course, there were health issues, but while he might have lost a step, Cummings never lost his passion. As bad as things have been in Baltimore since the spring of 2015, with the persistent violence, he never lost his belief in something better.

And people who saw him on the big stage in Washington or on the sidewalks of West Baltimore understood that about him. They understood him to be a righteous man and a fighter, someone who chose politics and public service because he believed in the possible, believed we could be so much better than we are.