When the word of the Lord came to Elijah, it arrived on a slip of paper tucked in a stranger’s bra.
In
2017, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) had been laid up in a Johns
Hopkins Hospital bed for two months, crippled by pain after a difficult
recovery from a heart valve replacement, when an interloper came
bursting through the door, calling his name.
“She
reaches into her bosom and pulls out a note,” Cummings said recently.
“She says, ‘The Lord has been waking me all night. . . . It was so
important I thought I’d write it down. It says: He don’t mean you no
harm, he’s just trying to get your attention. He wants you to know he
ain’t finished with you yet.’ ”
Cummings, 67,
recalled this story in an interview from his district office in
Baltimore. His head: freshly shaved. His eyes: puffy. His large hands:
swollen by gout. He wore big-platformed Velcro sneakers, which he had
been shuffling around in all day with the help of a walker.
Content from National Association of Realtors®
We took today’s most-commonly purchased interior and exterior features and put them under one roof to imagine what the most desirable home in America would look like.
Read More
If God was trying to get his attention, he wasn’t being subtle about it.
This
month, Democrats triumphed in elections across the country, winning
back the House of Representatives. In doing so, Cummings returns to
Congress hobbled physically but more powerful than ever. Armed with a
gavel and subpoenas, he is the soon-to-be chairman of the House
Oversight Committee.
For Cummings, this is the
culmination of two years riddled with painful moments, some beyond his
control and others that he walked into himself. He’d tried to work with
President Trump only to have it blow up in his face. He’d been ignored
by his Republican colleagues on the committee time and again. And he
just couldn’t seem to stay out of the hospital.
With
a healthy heart, and in control, Cummings has limitless possible
targets: hush money paid to a porn star on Trump’s behalf, citizenship
questions on the census, security clearances revoked from the
president’s critics, and dozens of other oh-yeah-remember-thats that
slipped out of the churning news cycle unanswered.
The
difficulty won’t be finding things to look into. It will be figuring
out what’s worth looking into. Cummings knows by now the risks that come
with opening wounds voluntarily. After he recovered from heart surgery,
he checked back into the hospital for another procedure — this time on
his knee. But something went wrong. The knee got infected, and Cummings
spent another three months at Hopkins.
He emerged more aware than ever that there’s only a finite amount of time in this world.
It will be up to him to make the best use of it.
In the past two years, Cummings has been hospitalized for several months. He says he is healthy and was itching to get back. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
“Elijah Cummings was
in my office,” Donald Trump told the New York Times in April 2017. “And
he said, ‘You will go down as one of the great presidents in the
history of our country.’ ”
It’s a prophecy that
Cummings said he never actually offered, and one that, if he does his
job well as Oversight Committee chairman, will almost certainly not come
true.
But
early in Trump’s presidency, while many Democrats were angst-ridden,
Cummings believed there was an opportunity for some good to come of it.
He attended the inauguration and chatted with the president at the
luncheon afterward about the need to lower prescription drug prices, an
issue he’d long championed.
“These drug
companies are getting away with murder,” Cummings said the president
told him. “We’ve got to do something about this.”
Later,
Cummings accepted an invitation to the Oval Office to discuss a bill he
co-wrote that would do just that, and he was heartened by Trump’s
continued enthusiasm.
As Cummings recalls, he
offered the president advice: If you stop trying to divide the country
and work on issues that can unite them, then you could go down in
history as a great president. He honestly believed it.
Cummings: The administration's policy has created 'child internment camps'
Rep.
Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) says the United States should be "better"
than keeping children away from their parents in "internment camps."
(Reuters)
The president had his base locked up no matter what, if Trump really believed shooting someone on Fifth Avenue wouldn’t make them stray, so then what would the risk be to work with Democrats? He used to be a Democrat, a little voice kept reminding Cummings.
“Perhaps
if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had a lot of hope,”
Cummings said. “He is a man who quite often calls the truth a lie and
calls a lie the truth.”
A week after their
meeting, Trump called Cummings to let him know he hadn’t forgotten about
the issue and still planned to take action on it. Cummings never heard
from Trump again.
Does Cummings’s belief that he could work with Trump make him unbelievably naive or a man of unshakable faith?
Cummings
grew up in Baltimore the son of two former sharecroppers from South
Carolina who moved to Baltimore and became preachers. He didn’t learn to
dance until prom because his parents thought it was a sin. He still
doesn’t know how to play cards.
And it was his
parents who drove him into public service, his own form of ministry. He
rarely gives a speech without mentioning his mother and how she used to
soak her feet in epsom salts, singing her prayers, each night after
cleaning houses. When his father died of a heart attack, shortly after
giving a sermon at a women’s detention center, Cummings arrived at the
morgue to sort through his belongings. He found in his father’s wallet a
note that Cummings had written him years earlier, folded and refolded
so many times over the years that it had holes in the paper.
“Did
you know that you’re my hero, and everything I’d like to be,” the note
said, quoting the song made popular by Bette Midler. “I can fly higher
than an eagle because you are the wind beneath my wings.”
Cummings’s spirituality can border on hokey like that, certainly earnest in a way that most politicians are not.
At
an election night watch party this year, he quoted a Garth Brooks song
(“This ain’t comin’ from no prophet, just an ordinary man”). His eyes
well up when he talks about his favorite musical, “The Lion King.” He
meditates before each committee hearing, he said, picturing himself
running down a long road, people in need of his help alongside him.
There have been stumbles. Early in Cummings’s political career, he faced financial strains. According to a 1999 Baltimore Sun article,
he owed more than $30,000 to the Internal Revenue Service (which he
paid), and five times creditors took him to court to get him to pay
$24,000 in overdue debts. Cummings told the paper he lacked money partly
because of a major surgery that drained his bank account and because he
helped support three children: a daughter he had with his
then-estranged wife and two children he had with other women.
“I
have a moral conscience that is real central,” Cummings told the Sun
then. “I didn’t ask the federal government or anyone else to do me any
favors.”
He remarried in 2008 (his second wife,
Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, a policy consultant, withdrew a bid for
Maryland governor while Elijah was in the hospital). He has lived in the
same inner-city house for three decades and, before serving 22 years in
Congress, spent 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates.
He
learned his moral code in the pews and, perhaps equally important for
someone going into politics, he learned the art of public speaking
there, too. The first testimony he remembers giving in front of the
congregation was thanking God for the integration of a local pool, which
came after numerous marches where he was beaten by segregationists. He
couldn’t have been more than 9.
He
used to run home from Sunday church service to lie on the floor and
listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches on his transistor radio.
He’s been thinking a lot about one of them.
It was on the “interruptions of life.”
“What
he was saying was, don’t let yourself get distracted because you may
never get back to what you were doing,” Cummings said. After two years
of Twitter tantrums from the president, wild news conferences, attacks
on the media and other smokescreens, the lesson, Cummings said, is
clear.
“Trump, apparently was listening to Martin Luther King,” he said.
The president, he said, certainly knows the power of a good distraction.
A staffer watches Cummings on TV during a hearing on Capitol Hill. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Another excerpt from the Book of Elijah:
“We’re
in a storm,” he said from his office atop Capitol Hill. “And it’s a
rough one. It’s not a question of whether the storm will end but when it
will end. How much of our democracy will be saved?”
Cummings
had just finished his first Oversight Committee hearing since election
night, one of his last as ranking Democrat. For six years, he has sat
beside the chairman, just out of reach of real power. He’s had his
microphone cut off by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). He was told he could
not put a woman
on a panel addressing contraceptives. In the past two years, he has had
64 subpoena requests ignored by Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.
The storm has been raging. But now Cummings can do something about it.
“I’m
going to try and make people realize that in order to live the life
they are living,” he said, “they need to have democracy, and it’s being
threatened.”
He’s no longer asking for answers;
he’s demanding. Of course, that doesn’t mean the Trump administration
will comply. Its officials have been known to be difficult, sometimes
even with fellow Republicans.
“I sent letters
and subpoenas to the Trump administration and got no response,” Jason
Chaffetz, the Oversight Committee’s Republican former chairman told The Washington Post this month. “I was stymied every step of the way. What makes you think Elijah Cummings will get a response?”
Cummings admits that this is a concern.
He
also knows that his best bet to get anything done is to be focused, not
to, as he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week,” hand out
subpoenas “like somebody’s handing out candy on Halloween.”
Cummings has been on the other side of high-profile hearings that felt to him like a sham.
There was Operation Fast and Furious,
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program that
tried to track illegal weapons sales. He was the ranking Democrat of the
Select Committee on Benghazi, a Republican-led effort to investigate
the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.
Those
investigations were derided by Democrats as politically motivated and,
of course, Republicans will say the same about anything Cummings decides
to investigate
Cummings says he wants to be
judicious, but is that possible? How do you not try to peek at Trump’s
tax returns, or figure out who exactly has been staying at Trump International Hotel
in Washington, or determine how former Environmental Protection Agency
administrator Scott Pruitt was able to get away with buying so many
first-class airline tickets on taxpayers’ dime?
“I can’t imagine anyone better qualified and more passionate about oversight than Elijah,” Gowdy said in an interview.
But,
even if Cummings is open and transparent and does everything by the
book, there’s at least one Republican who won’t see it that way.
“If
the Democrats think they are going to waste Taxpayer Money
investigating us at the House level, then we will likewise be forced to
consider investigating them for all of the leaks of Classified
information, and much else, at the Senate level,” Trump tweeted
recently. “Two can play that game!”
“We’re in a storm,” Cummings said from his office atop Capitol Hill. “And it’s a rough one. It’s not a question of whether the storm will end but when it will end. How much of our democracy will be saved?” (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Is it
possible that Democrats are getting carried away? Can Cummings really be
the hero they need to stand up to Trump? After all, Cummings may want
to maintain the moral high ground, but is that even possible in a fight
with the president? Is it the best way to win — to bring a Bible to a
knife fight?
Leana Wen, the new president of
Planned Parenthood, said it’s not for her to say, necessarily, but she
knows a fighter when she sees one. She worked with Cummings during her
time as the Baltimore health commissioner. She loved him so much that
she named her first child after him.
“When he
was in the hospital, I tried not to think . . . about what could
happen,” she said. “As a physician, I know a lot about the worst-case
scenarios because I’ve seen it.”
The day she saw him for the first time out of the hospital, he looked tired. She told him it was good to see him.
“He said, ‘It’s good to be seen and not viewed, if you know what I mean,’ ” she recalled. “To me, that meant he was back.”
Cummings
tends to downplay his time in the hospital. It was just a little
shortness of breath. Then a simple heart procedure that should have him
home within three days. Then a gout flare-up and rehabilitation to gain
back muscle tone lost from weeks unable to move.
Yes,
it was excruciatingly painful, he’ll say. But, no, he never really
thought his life was in danger. He was always itching to get back.
“If he were to slow down too much,” his younger brother James Cummings said, “it would probably kill him.”
In that case, the next two years may be the healthiest of Elijah Cummings’s life.
No comments:
Post a Comment