There’s an anecdote from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free about a fairly bog-standard German judge who presided over a case of a Jewish man accused of both a “race crime” (sex with an Aryan woman) and a moderately serious, actual crime, which would mean a jail sentence instead of a trip to the camps. The judge ended up making the legally correct ruling about the actual crime (not guilty), following the norms of his profession that he had been in for decades. The Jewish man was picked up by the SS and killed in the camps. The judge said that he was haunted by his decision afterward, but how could he have convicted a man of a crime he was innocent of?

Anyway, I think about that story whenever I see an elected Dem paralyzed by the desire to uphold the normal duties of their office, like a governor meeting with a president to talk about policy compromises.