Jeffrey Abramson’s excellent essay on political resignations reminded me of something I recalled Daniel Patrick Moynihan saying in a Senate debate over welfare. This, from September 14, 1995, remains apt: “I say once again there is such a thing as resigning in Government, and there comes a time when, if principle matters at all, you resign. People who resign on principle come back; people whose real views are less important than their temporary position, ‘their brief authority,’ as Shakespeare once put it, disappear.”