Nick Mosby is right. It’s time to move on.

I agree with Nick

Mosby, the Baltimore City Council president: It’s “time to move forward.”

Time for Our City of Perpetual Recovery to recover from all its historic ailments and move forward.

Time for Baltimoreans to enjoy a lovely decade where no city leader gets indicted or even audited.

Time for the Orioles to win the American League pennant.

Time for Nick Mosby to find new employment.

I’m sure he will. There’s a good job market out there, and he can probably land a satisfying position in the private sector, where, for one thing, he is less likely to draw the attention of federal authorities.

Nick did not ask me for personal advice — hardly anyone does — but I think a reversion to a quiet, private lifestyle would be in order after all the public tumult. Nick has experienced tax debt, a car repossession, divorce, the indictment and trials of his former wife, and now the revelation that he lied not only to Marilyn Mosby about the couple’s finances but to the public as well.

And then there’s the matter of $36,000 in charitable donations the Mosbys could not afford to make, according to federal prosecutors, though the couple claimed to have done so in tax returns.

That’s a lot. My advice: Get out of the spotlight and move on. A new phase of life awaits. When one door closes, another opens and all that.

And yet, despite his lack of honesty about his tax debts, and what for most of us would amount to public humiliation,

Nick Mosby pledges to do better if he’s elected to another term as council president.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “We learn from our mistakes and move on.”

True. No human being on the planet would argue with that.

We’ve all made mistakes. We say or do stupid things and sometimes hurt the people we love. We make choices that damage important relationships or even destroy them. Sometimes apologies work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they seem to settle things, but scars remain.

So, yes, we learn and move on.

But the people we offend can still feel burned. They forgive but don’t forget.

Sheila Dixon’s legal problems go back more than 14 years. She’s running for mayor again, her third attempt at regaining the office she was forced to leave amid scandal. Dixon “moved on” years ago, but voters did not; many refused to send back to City Hall someone they no longer felt they could trust.

By now, there’s a new generation of voters who have no memory of Dixon’s time as mayor; what they hear about her goes something like this: “Effective mayor, stole gift cards intended for children.”

Do the new Baltimoreans vote for her?

Do older Baltimoreans finally give her a second chance?

The answer to those two questions will come in the Democratic primary in May.

If Dixon wins, we can say Baltimore has finally “moved on” in the sense of finally forgiving her enough to hand her the swipe card to the mayor’s office.

If she loses, we can say Baltimore has finally “moved on” by decreeing, once and for all, that Dixon is no longer wanted as mayor.

It looks like a similar test awaits Nick Mosby.

His recent problems could rub off on Dixon.

Both could suffer at the polls from a burning voter desire to get past this long era of corruption, scandal and embarrassment.

As I say, it would be nice to go 10 years — even five — without hearing about a federal investigation of a mayor or council president, police commissioner or state’s attorney.

That would be “moving on” in the good sense.

“Moving on” in the bad sense carries an element of denial with it. The person who says, “Let’s move on,” before there’s been a full accounting of damage, wants to run right past the car wreck.

Supporters of Donald Trump are in that category when it comes to a question before the Supreme Court: Whether the former Republican president should be barred from a state ballot as a presidential candidate because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that most Americans, but few Republicans, think the Jan. 6 attack threatened democracy. Only 14% of Republicans say Trump bears a “great deal” or “good amount” of responsibility for the attack.

More than 70% of them think too much is being made of the attack and that it is “time to move on.”

Those people reside in America’s 51st state, the state of denial.

Fortunately, we have the Constitution and, as noted in my previous column, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars from holding office anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against same.”

Disqualification is a civil process. Trump also faces criminal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. A federal appellate court says Trump is not immune from prosecution. Both matters — presidential immunity and disqualification — will be decided by the Supreme Court.

The millions of us who live outside the state of denial want full accountability, a true reckoning, for what happened on

Jan. 6. Then maybe we can “move on,” and maybe even “move forward.”