To resign or not to resign

What if he had resigned? President Bill Clinton pictured during the 1999 State of the Union address with Vice President Al Gore and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Il. Photo By Pool/Getty Images.

Before we get to the matter of state Sen. Nicole Mitchell, DFL-Woodbury, who’s been charged with burglarizing her stepmother’s home, let’s talk about the public’s perception of politicians. 

Americans generally don’t like or trust them. In Gallup’s poll asking the public about the “honesty and ethical standards” of various professions, members of Congress are near the bottom, with 62% of respondents rating them “low” or “very low.” 

The reason people say this, I suspect, is because it’s been drilled into their brains for decades that politicians are untrustworthy — and the government they lead is corrupt and incompetent. 

For the most part, neither is remotely true. To start: Very few people know members of Congress or state legislators, so how could they possibly judge their truthfulness or ethics?

The reason they think they know it is because Washington media is hyper competitive, and negativity drives audience and engagement, so they hear a bunch of bad stuff about politicians. 

For a host of additional reasons, journalists who cover politics and government tend to be more adversarial than journalists who cover, say, business or sports — though still not adversarial enough! — so we don’t hear about every minor scandal affecting every VP at Target, whereas the contretemps of a state legislator can become national news. 

Also, Republicans are the anti-government party, so negativity about politicians and government works in their favor. As the saying goes, government doesn’t work — just elect us and we’ll show you. 

The upshot is broad cynicism about the possibilities of politics — they’re all crooks and liars so what does it matter? 

That’s precisely the attitude that fueled the election of a demagogue like Donald Trump. (Quick aside: The gleeful hyperventilating of Minnesota Republicans this week over Mitchell’s arrest is amusing given that their standard bearer, the man they want to be president, is currently on trial for falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn star to help his 2016 presidential campaign.)

Related: The nation’s founders believed that to prevent the slide from democracy into tyranny, we need virtuous leaders. Here’s the author of Federalist No. 57: 

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

Both as a matter of public virtue and smart politics, people who believe in government should demand upstanding behavior from their candidates and elected officials and force out those who can’t live by some pretty simple rules, e.g., don’t break into houses in the middle of the night. Or drive drunk. Or get blotto drunk at a Capitol area hotel and cause a disturbance, then drive drunk a few years later. 

Violation of these simple rules ought to lead to resignation. You’ve shown poor judgment and embarrassed the institution, your constituents, your family and yourself. 

The prevailing political model, however, is to brazen it out. The aforementioned president has set the standard, but he’s hardly alone. We all saw photos of a recent Democratic governor of Virginia in black face, but there he was, day after day, just acting like it never happened.  

One of the great counterfactuals of American history is what might have happened had Bill Clinton resigned instead of dragging America through the blue dress impeachment saga. At the time, Democrats viewed Clinton as a savior from the sorrows of the Reagan-Bush era who had to be defended at all costs. And it was also true that the people pursuing him — the same charlatans defending Donald Trump now, like Newt Gingrich and Laura Ingraham — really were a right-wing cabal.

But a Clinton resignation would have made a powerful statement about the obligations of high office, about sexual harassment in the workplace, and about the importance of a movement compared to a mere man. 

At least some of the accusations against U.S. Sen. Al Franken were unfair, but his colleagues surely had an easier time campaigning and governing without having to explain away his State Fair handsiness — and Tina Smith has made a fine senator as his replacement.

Which brings us to Mitchell, who can’t be replaced before the end of the legislative session on May 20. She is innocent until proven guilty, but the arrest, her shifting story about the circumstances of the alleged burglary, and her public disclosure of her stepmother’s dementia, are all disqualifying for public office.  

Should she resign? Would continuing to serve damage the institution, her party, her district, more than her absence — and a deadlocked, 33-33 Senate — would injure her constituents? Minnesotans would suffer real effects if the Legislature were to go home without completing even this year’s modest goals. 

This is the difficult question she must answer.

I acknowledge this has been a moralizing column, priggish even, but I also believe that there’s hardly a greater power in the world than reconciliation and redemption. 

If Mitchell wants to begin traveling that road, I’d recommend she show up, answer all the questions from colleagues and press truthfully, and do the work until May 20. 

Then she should resign and take care of herself and her family and make good on her obligations.

And if she does all that, I’d happily write a column about her comeback in a few years. 

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