Our house overwhelms me at times, especially now during this pandemic. None of it seems new: My homebound kids still use every dish in the kitchen and toss into the hamper every stitch of clothing that's only momentarily touched their bodies. But the volume has definitely risen.
Their father, trying to be helpful recently, thanked me profusely in their presence, gushing with bravado about how I had wrestled more than my fair share of laundry and dishes from their precarious piles to some orderly assembly.
A well-meant, but still theatrical ingratiation meant to model thankfulness and reduce his guilty conscience for leaving me to figure out how to work such a miracle, especially now that the mechanical devices we normally employ both unceremoniously tendered their resignations on the morrow of their warranties' demise.
I have to remind myself to take deep breaths.
Guilt is a slippery emotion. I can see it in my daughter's eyes as she asks me a technical question about the task at hand, followed by an assertion that she intends to use this information to unburden me.
A few hours later, the promise unfulfilled, she looks at me in anger when I muse aloud about lip service.
She apologizes and is quickly forgiven. It's not fatal.
Not like a different kind of lip-service is coming out of our other House.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday backed a resolution urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove President Donald Trump from office after he urged on a crowd of supporters to storm the Capitol building on January 6th and interfere with the ceremonial vote court that officially acknowledges Joe Biden as president-elect.
Pence rejected the call.
Rep. Elise Stefanik voted against the resolution, and then remarkably, calling for the sides to "unify."
“We must work together to unify at this challenging time for the American people," she said. "This political resolution sets a very dangerous Constitutional precedent and further divides our country. I believe we should focus on ensuring a safe transfer of power on January 20."
Stefanik was among the Republicans who, based on cherry-picked sentiment and no evidence, voted to challenge some states' electors after the presidential election. She sought to stop a mostly proforma vote count in Congress, presumably to appease Trump and the seditious mob that his party spent years priming.
She continued to side with Trump's lies when Congress reconvened after the siege to complete their work of naming a successor to the defeated Trump.
But Stefanik is not asking for unity, she's demanding capitulation.
The peaceful transfer of power requires more than a hollow call for playing nice. It requires her and her cohorts to acknowledge the damage these lies - the ones she continues to peddle - have done to democracy and that continue to upend the peace. She must make amends.
Each day since she's could join with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to calm the madness. But it requires her to admit her actions were wrong and destructive. She must renounce them.
Rep. Elise Stefanik is on the wrong side of history. She is pushing a troubling agenda fueled by lies and divisiveness. And each day, in fact, each hour, as we learn more facts surrounding the insurrection in the nation's Capitol, we feel even more uncertain about the ground shift beneath us because these new revelations only hint at the bigger story unfolding.
There is no peace without justice, there is no justice without truth, and there will be no unity without an effort to repair the faith that is broken.
Anything else is just lip service in support of a lie.
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