When the president doxes a senator over a clock

The New York Post reports that President Trump broadcast Senator Tom Cotton's personal cell number to the world in anger over Cotton's resistance to a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent. I have no opinion to offer on what hour the sun should be said to rise. But I have a very firm opinion on what happens to free government when the executive branch uses public exposure as a cudgel against the legislative branch.

The framers — and I was near enough to their debates to speak with some confidence here — separated the powers precisely because they knew that men with authority will, when no fence restrains them, use any tool at hand to get their way. The senator's private number is a small thing. The precedent of publishing it is not small at all. It says: disagree with me and I will make your private life a public nuisance. That is not persuasion. That is pressure of the sort a landlord applies to a tenant, not the sort a president applies to an equal branch of government.

I spent years as a postmaster, and I understood better than most that information is power. The postal road existed to move information freely — not to let any one man decide whose letters arrived and whose did not. Today's equivalent, a social media platform with tens of millions of followers, carries the same principle forward. When that reach is used to expose a private citizen's — or a senator's — personal contact, it collapses the distance between a free press and a mob dispatch. The New York Post describes the act as "furious retaliation," which tells you the motive was not civic enlightenment but personal punishment.

I will allow that Cotton's opposition may have frustrated the president sincerely. In my own time I was frustrated by legislatures that would not see reason, and I said so plainly in print. But I signed my name to what I wrote, stated my argument, and left the reader to judge. Printing a man's private number and inviting the crowd to ring it is not argument; it is harassment dressed in the clothes of transparency.

The practical counsel I would offer to any working person watching this episode: note which institutions push back and which do not. A republic's health is best read not in its moments of crisis but in the quiet fortitude of the people and bodies that say, calmly, this is not how we do things here. If senators of the president's own party cannot dissent on a matter as modest as the hour of sunrise without having their private lives exposed, ask yourself what dissent on a larger matter will cost. That is not a partisan question. It is the oldest question in self-government.