Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco, is co-counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
March 1 was a good day. We learned that Asteroid 2022 AE1, a heavenly body large enough to do real damage and thought to hit Earth on Independence Day 2023, will miss us.
Of course, the climate apocalypse, symbolized by the meteor hurtling toward Earth in the recent pop film “Don’t Look Up,” is still before us. But if you scan the headlines from the past week, some positive light shone through, but time will tell its duration.
Internationally, in Ukraine, for the moment at least, David has Goliath stumbling.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has established himself as a global hero, inspiring resistance in his country, world-wide demonstrations, and a rebirth of the European Union as a powerful, unified force.
Autocratic leaders in Hungary and Poland, whose knee-jerk response is usually to back Russian President Vladimir Putin, have opposed the invasion. Neutral countries that usually stay silent have taken sides against Putin, Finland even contemplating aligning with NATO.
The Russians, supposedly masters of propaganda, are losing the battle for the narrative day after day. On March 1, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter lambasted Putin.
The world has unified in applying severe sanctions against Putin, and, while not likely to stop his mad and illegal assault, will soon take a deep bite out of the Russian economy and build a foundation for national opposition to the war and potentially to him. The Wall Street Journal reported on March 1 that traders will not buy Russian oil for fear they will get stuck with it.
On March 2, Russian oil, gas and bank stocks collapsed on the world market. You can’t run a war on economic fumes. Television cameras captured Russian citizens standing in impossibly long bank lines to withdraw cash.
In Washington, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection reported new activity. On March 1, it subpoenaed six Trump lawyers. That list included Cleta Mitchell, who was on Donald Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump asked him to find 11,780 votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and Kenneth Chesebro, who reportedly played a role in the forged electoral slates that the Trump campaign arranged to have sent to Congress for the electoral vote count.
The same day, momentum built toward Republican support in the Senate for Biden’s Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black woman with a stellar resume. The highly regarded Republican lawyer William Burck, who represented Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn, followed two esteemed conservative former federal judges in endorsing her nomination.
On March 1, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that it was “ unacceptable ” for fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to have stood on a podium with neo-Nazi Nicholas Fuentes on Feb. 25. The day before, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had also excoriated Greene. These actions show shared American values still working in party leadership amidst the damage done to them by disinformation and political fear over the past five years.
Those shared values showed themselves again on March 1 in the unusual fact that 201 House Republicans and 221 Democrats joined together to pass the Emmett Tillett Anti-Lynching Act. Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy whom Mississippi Delta racists murdered in 1955, after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. They weighted his lifeless, beaten body and threw it in the river.
Social media companies have gotten more aggressive about hateful speech and disinformation. On March 1, Twitter suspended the account of U.S. Senate candidate Vicky Hartzler for an anti-transgender tweet attacking “men pretending to be women.” On the same day, YouTube took a similar aggressive approach by blocking channels linked to Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik.
All these are good things. It’s okay to look up.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.