Cheatle right to resign from Secret Service

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Journalists should never bury the lead. So the headline news is that Kimberly A. Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, resigned on Tuesday due to her agency’s performance in protecting former President Donald Trump.

In what Cheatle herself called the “single greatest operational failure” in decades, Trump was grazed by a bullet, a rallygoer was killed and two others were critically injured before Secret Service gunmen killed the alleged attempted assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa.

We won’t bury our opinion, either: Cheatle was right to resign. In fact, she should have done so sooner.

But a secondary story related to the resignation is also notable: a rare breakout of bipartisan congressional consensus surrounding the issue, on display at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Monday in which exasperated Democrats matched their Republican colleagues’ anger at answers — or more often, nonanswers — to representatives’ questions.

While the GOP lawmakers’ rhetoric was hotter, Democrats, including coolheaded Jamie Raskin of Maryland, spoke for Congress and the country when he said that he “didn’t see any daylight between the members of the two parties today at the hearing, in terms of our bafflement and outrage.” Calling on Cheatle to resign, Raskin added that “the director has lost the confidence of Congress, at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country.“

There are scores more performances in the federal government that merit bafflement and indeed even outrage at this urgent and tender moment. And Congress and the country would be well-served by bipartisan focus on them, ideally resulting in fixes.

But for now, it’s reassuring — and maybe even worthy of its own headline — to see that Washington can work after one of its entities failed to do so on that fateful day in Pennsylvania.