Rep. Elijah Cummings says it's love of country, not spite, driving Trump investigations


Following former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's testimony on Wednesday before two congressional panels, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said it was "a giant step in making sure the American people got a picture" of Mueller's report, and they will "hopefully look towards the future and say, we're not going to have this."
"This is a critical moment in our country's history," he said. "This is a moment people will be talking about and reading about 300, 400, 500 years from now." They will ask what lawmakers did about a president who "knew the rules and knew our founding fathers had done a great job of creating a Constitution and put in all the guardrails," yet still disregards all that. This is not normal, Cummings continued, and "we're not going to get used to this kind of conduct by the president and our attorney general and our Republican colleagues. ... We refuse to accept it."
Cummings is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and said people will remark that Democratic leaders are "just messing with the president because you don't like him. It's not about not liking the president. It's about loving democracy. It's about loving our country. It's about making a difference for a generation yet unborn. That's what this is all about. I'm begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on, because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children and your children's children and generations yet unborn, we have to guard this moment. This is our watch."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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