When Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski died in a traffic accident last month, readers of the Washington Post write-up had to wait until the final paragraph — below the fulsome tributes from a bipartisan array of colleagues; below the discussions of her anti-abortion politics and her committee assignments — to learn about what may have been the most important vote of her career: On January 6th, 2021, she voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

That was more than the paper’s readers got in the stories about the passing of fellow GOP Representatives Jim Hagedorn and Ron Wright, who have also died in the 20 months since the Capitol insurrection. Their votes to overturn an American presidential election went unmentioned in the reports about their deaths.

Obituaries and news coverage of deaths are an imperfect form, especially when they have to double as breaking stories of a public figure’s unexpected demise. All the same, they are as close as we get to a rough draft of biography, an approximation of what contemporaries think are the key parts of the dearly departed’s permanent record. And so far, they reveal a Washington culture deeply uncertain about election denial and its legacy.

Rep. Jim Hagedorn addresses a crowd at a campaign rally for President Donald Trump in 2020.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The culture of Washington news reporters, like the folkways of the Hill, is also broadly forgiving of tough votes. People in the game of politics know the various cross-pressures and cost-benefit analyses and assumptions about the vote’s outcome that go into an aye or a nay. The old cliche is that the most important vote is the next one. It’s normal to not sweat too much about a back-bencher’s prior vote. Coverage of deaths or retirements of elected officials routinely skip over votes in major issues that weren’t “their” bills and might not have been central to their political identity — the Iraq War, say, or Obamacare.

The problem is that we’ve spent years hearing about how the effort to overturn the election was not normal and must not be made to seem so.

In other words, the case of the missing obit mentions is yet another case of one old norm (don’t speak ill of the dead, don’t be one of those naive types who think of any single vote as defining a pol’s career) against another (attempts to interrupt American democracy are a big deal). And Washington, almost two years after the end of the norm-busting Trump administration, still goes back and forth about how to think it all through — or, more likely, doesn’t think about it too much and simply reverts to workflow that effectively lets the efforts to undo an election get treated like just another bit of legislative arcana.

The logistical and political and social impulse to sweep things under the rug is strong, and often not motivated by ill intent. It ought to be resisted all the same.

Ron Wright walks to a session during member-elect briefings and orientation on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018.