The convening day of a new Congress is usually a joyous day in the sense that we celebrate another constitutional victory, a victory of freedom over the forces of authoritarianism that threatens constitutional order.

On this day, we observe the swearing-in of the 118th Congress of the United States.

We used to take this day for granted; it was axiomatic that elections would be free and uncontested when clearly lost by the losers. Amidst panics, national division, the great run-up to Civil War, the Civil War itself, the labor-capital tensions of the late 19th century, World Wars I and II and through the Great Depression, Watergate and through the darkest years of the Trump Presidency, our two-year national renewal of representative democracy rolled on.

But this year, aside from mourning the loss of the House to the Republicans, we are shocked, chagrined and infuriated by the apparent seating of one George A. Santos, if that is in fact his real name, as the duly elected member of the United States House of Representatives from the Third Congressional District of New York.

So, as I am wont to do in dark and puzzling times, I have turned to Lincoln.

I was reminded of what was perhaps one his most eloquent written state papers, his Dec. 1, 1862, Annual Message to Congress.

One can only imagine the physically and psychically beleaguered 16th president sitting and writing by hand this majestic, powerful message in a kerosene lantern-lit, dreary wartime White House. It had been a horrid year for the Union and Mr. Lincoln. “If there is a place worse than hell,” Lincoln had said the previous summer, “then I am in it.”

Lincoln wrote:

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered despite ourselves. No personal significance of insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation”

Lincoln concluded his Message:

“The way is plain, peaceful, generous — a way, which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless”.

May our elected leaders have the courage, morality, grace, and firmness to dispose of Mr. Santos through process, but based on the enormity of the fraud that he has committed not just to his party; not only to us, his constituents, but to the ethos of the greatness of American political tradition.

Jon F. Weinstein

Port Washington

* The author worked as a U.S. House staff member for five years.