The Homefront Report: Please Hold, the Baby Is on the Coffee Table

On congressional oversight, public health, and maintaining a household whose youngest resident has discovered altitude.

Washington has apparently discovered that the easiest way to manage unfinished business is to leave the building, with House Speaker Mike Johnson sending lawmakers home early while efforts to force accountability votes remain unresolved. I would like to formally apply this management philosophy to our laundry, although I suspect the laundry will insist on a hearing. According to the Associated Press, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie’s push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and secure further Epstein disclosures was left without votes as members departed to campaign.

Meanwhile, here at home, we have achieved something that I believe deserves at least a modest ribbon-cutting ceremony: our bathroom sink works. It’s Thursday, which means that once we survive Friday and Saturday, we arrive at Sunday, whatever that’s good for when you have children, a house, and several appliances with unresolved grievances. For the first time since we moved here, however, we will be approaching the weekend with a bathroom sink that functions as something other than a small, inconvenient storage shelf.

The sequence of events responsible for this miracle began with Odin getting into a little scuffle with my husband’s uncle’s dog. He’s fine, but he came home dirty and grimy, so I gave him a much-needed bath, which clogged the tub, because apparently every household improvement must first pass through a separate household disaster.

I asked my brother to grab some drain cleaner and come over, and while he was here, he decided to look at the sink. He’d been thinking about it, apparently, which was enough to get him under there after mine and my husband’s countless previous attempts to fix it. This time, it worked, and my daughter promptly relocated her toothbrush from the kitchen with the enthusiasm of someone whose application for better housing had finally been approved.

Our oldest comes home today after a week at his mom’s, something my daughter has been reminding me about since approximately the moment he left last Thursday. We saw him briefly last night when he stopped by to pick up his new locker shelf, and she was deeply opposed to the part where he had to leave again. She misses her brother, and I love watching how much she loves him, even when her preferred visitation schedule is simply that nobody ever goes anywhere without her permission.

Dance class also returns from its summer hiatus today, and she has made certain that this information remains available to me at all times. As a former dancer myself, I am overjoyed, although I was less emotionally prepared for her recent announcement that we should get rid of her play kitchen.

“I want to get rid of the kitchen so you can get me a balance beam.”

Apparently, we are closing the restaurant and opening an Olympic training facility, and I am supposed to conduct this transition without crying about how big and beautiful and athletic she is becoming. I am so proud of her, even if nobody consulted me before advancing her to this next stage of childhood.

Ezra, my mister boy, my sweet baby pie, has also been pursuing athletic development, primarily by discovering that the furniture has an upstairs. There is nothing quite like walking into a room and finding your one-year-old standing on a coffee table with pure joy in his eyes and absolutely no indication that he has reviewed the risks.

The laws of babyproofing have consequently been reinstated, which is wonderful until I forget they exist, attempt to open a cabinet, and nearly fall on my ass because the cabinet has become a secured government facility. This reminds me of a prank I played on my husband years ago, back when I apparently had enough administrative capacity to maintain a months-long refrigerator operation. For context, my husband is six-foot-three and roughly 200 pounds, much of it muscle, which becomes relevant when discussing how much force a person might apply to a refrigerator door.

Over several months, I gradually lined ours with magnets, making it progressively harder to open until he became accustomed to the resistance. Then, in the middle of the night, I removed them all. The following morning, he opened the refrigerator with his usual amount of force and nearly brought the whole thing over onto himself. Months of preparation produced a few seconds of absolute chaos, and I considered the return on investment exceptional.

I do have to remember that other people have feelings and can’t spend their entire lives participating in experiments they didn’t agree to, but nevertheless, we enjoy each other around here. We’re still figuring this life out as homeowners, parents, bill payers, and the owners of sacrificial limbs to be presented to the gods of the underworld in exchange for fuel. Today, though, my bonus son comes home, we will all watch my daughter through the window at dance because she insists we see, and then we will return to our little patch of earth and keep trying to make it better while the administration seems determined to test how much damage the rest of the country can absorb.

Which brings me, naturally, back to the people who have decided that now would be an excellent time to leave work. According to reporting from the Guardian, Johnson canceled Thursday’s scheduled House votes, sending members into their election recess early and postponing consideration of Massie’s impeachment resolution. Johnson dismissed the effort as a publicity stunt and defended the House’s productivity. The resolution remains an accusation requiring congressional consideration, not a finding that Hegseth committed impeachable offenses.

That distinction is precisely why the process matters. Congress is where lawmakers are supposed to examine allegations, debate the use of executive power, and put their positions on the record. If leadership believes an accusation is unfounded, it can make that argument while everybody is still seated. Instead, we get the legislative equivalent of hearing a strange noise under the hood and deciding the responsible thing is to turn up the radio until November.

I don’t expect every member of Congress to agree with Massie, and agreeing with him on the need for a vote doesn’t require adopting his entire worldview. I do expect the institution entrusted with oversight to remain available for the oversight portion of its responsibilities. Asking voters to renew your employment while declining to complete an uncomfortable assignment is a bold interpretation of the performance-review process.

Over in the Senate, another Republican was making a much more direct argument about consequences. According to Reuters, Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate health committee, used Wednesday’s hearing for administration health nominees to condemn vaccine misinformation and misguided policies, citing four reported measles deaths in Pennsylvania. He warned that the deaths would become a “terrible legacy for this administration,” while pressing for health leadership grounded in science. Reuters also notes that Cassidy helped confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary despite Kennedy’s history of vaccine opposition. That history deserves to remain in the frame. Speaking up now matters, and so does asking what a senator will do with the authority that accompanies the microphone.

Surgeon general nominee Nicole Saphier, meanwhile, said vaccines do not cause autism and defended the MMR vaccine during questioning, according to the Associated Press. Those statements are welcome, but the next question is whether that position survives contact with political pressure once someone is in office.

Parents already spend enough time trying to determine whether a cough requires a doctor, whether the school form is due tomorrow, and whether the baby has acquired the ability to scale the entertainment center. We shouldn’t also need to investigate whether federal health guidance has been edited to accommodate somebody’s favorite internet theory. Public trust takes work to build, and the people entrusted with it ought to understand that a confirmation hearing is the beginning of that responsibility.

Then there is the water, which continues to operate without regard for anybody’s campaign schedule. A report released today by the World Meteorological Organization finds that 2025 was among the driest years for global river flows in 35 years. Water stored on land has been declining for roughly a decade, and every major glaciated region lost ice for the fourth consecutive year. The report describes a water cycle increasingly prone to swings between too much and too little, with the past seven years showing unusually few rivers within their normal flow range.

That is a much larger problem than anything my brother can address under a bathroom sink, but having a faucet work again does make me think about how easily we build our routines around things we assume will be there. We turn the handle, fill the cup, water the plants, wash the child, and continue with the day. Behind those small actions are systems that require maintenance, planning, and people willing to respond before a problem becomes an emergency. The same is true of public health and democratic government, although neither comes with a convenient cabinet you can open to locate the person responsible for the leak.

I keep coming back to my daughter carrying her toothbrush into the bathroom, delighted by something the rest of us had almost stopped expecting to work. There’s a lesson in that, and I would prefer we learn it before we grow equally accustomed to a government that doesn’t.

Tonight, we’ll watch her dance, welcome her brother home, and try to keep Ezra from establishing a second residence on the coffee table. We’ll keep repairing what we can on our little patch of earth, because the people we love have to live here. I would like the people running the country to approach their responsibilities with that same understanding, and preferably before announcing that they’ve done enough for the week.

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