The Insurrectionists Among Us

When treason finds its way to your home, and your family tree.

Tuesday morning, a time that already feels like decades ago, a woman named Mary Miller spoke at a “Moms For America Saving the Republic” rally for Donald Trump on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Miller was recently sworn in to the House of Representatives from Illinois and had just announced that she would vote to oppose certification of Joe Biden’s election as President of the United States. (Two days later, in a chamber that had just been ransacked by insurrectionists, she did.) Miller, in her speech, argued that what was most important, the key to her appearance that day, was that her fellow Trump supporters needed to capture the hearts and minds of children. She used a most curious example to illustrate this point.

The backlash was immediate: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and several members of Congress from Illinois blasted her comments, and there were multiple calls for her resignation. Miller has not made any public statement since the backlash hit, and she had no comment on the thousands of her fellow Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol Building on Wednesday in one of the darkest scenes any of us have ever witnessed in this country. But she did make sure to show up and vote against Biden’s victory late Wednesday night. It is possible, even likely, that her Hitler comment will be lost in all the madness of Wednesday. I bet in a week we all forget it happened at all.

But this is not the first time I have come across Mary Miller. Mary Miller isn’t just a newly elected member of Congress; she’s my newly elected member of Congress. Well, she is not currently my representative; that would be Rep. Jody Hice, here in Georgia, who is no great shakes himself. But she represents 13 counties in Central Illinois, including Coles County, where I grew up in my hometown of Mattoon. She in fact lives in Coles County (though she is originally from Naperville, in the north Chicago suburbs), in a small town called Oakland, which has a population…