Opinion | Ben Cardin will leave behind a legacy of public service

In Maryland, where Mr. Cardin has served as the youngest speaker of the House of Delegates in its 246-year history, as a representative in the U.S. House and, since 2007, as U.S. senator, he has been an advocate for increased aid to education, tax relief for low-income families and environmental protections. He has championed cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, directing tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to bay research and restoration.

Perhaps Mr. Cardin’s most profound legacy derives from his time in the Senate, where he has been a pillar of good-faith bipartisanship as well as a staunch advocate of human rights — even challenging Democratic presidential administrations on the issue. This is a signal achievement.

Mr. Cardin was the co-chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which promotes democracy in former Soviet-bloc nations, an organization of which he remains a commissioner. And it was through this work that, alongside his since-deceased colleague, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he embarked on one of his signature accomplishments, the Magnitsky Act of 2012.

That measure is named for Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who exposed massive corruption at the highest levels in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime and consequently was arrested, falsely accused of corruption, denied medical care in prison, beaten by guards and left to die in his cell in 2009. The law Mr. Cardin helped craft placed sanctions on Russian officials responsible for Magnitsky’s death — for the first time allowing the U.S. government to target individuals directly involved in human rights violations, rather than just governments. In 2016, the Obama administration signed a global expansion of the Magnitsky Act into law.

“In a world of limited diplomatic options to counter some of the worst crimes against humanity,” Mr. Cardin wrote in a 2018 op-ed for the Post, “such actions are effective because people of means want to bank in the financial powerhouse that is the United States and want to travel to our diverse, beautiful country.”

Mr. Cardin pushed for that legislation to hold the Saudi royal family accountable for the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist. He did so even when it meant disagreeing with his own party. Once the facts of the Khashoggi case were established, it was a “disappointment” that the Biden administration did not sanction Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman directly, Mr. Cardin told The Post this week. “We clearly know the crown prince was involved,” he said.

As Mr. Cardin retires from a career of more than 50 years of public service, Maryland will lose a loyal steward and the Senate will lose one of its most influential foreign policy minds. Even in his departure, he has set an example. As he told The Post: “There’s more to life than being a public official.”