Kaptur hospitalized after hit-and-run, police say

Marcy Kaptur was on her way to church. That's the detail worth sitting with for a second before anything else. An 80-year-old woman, the longest-serving woman in the history of the House, gets hit by someone who then just drives away. Whatever you think of her politics, and we've disagreed with plenty of them over her four decades in Congress, there's nothing partisan about wishing her a fast recovery and being disgusted by whoever left the scene.

That's really the whole story right now, since the injuries are described as non-life-threatening and the driver hasn't been named. But it's worth pausing on how normal this has become as a news item. A member of Congress gets hit by a car and flees the scene, and it registers as a two-paragraph wire story rather than the outrage it should be. Hit-and-runs happen to ordinary Americans every day in every city, and most of them don't get the police resources or the news coverage that come with a congresswoman's name attached. That imbalance is worth noticing even in a story about someone we don't often agree with.

We hope Kaptur heals up fine and gets back to work, arguing the things she argues, because that's how this is supposed to work. And we hope whoever did this gets found. Leaving an elderly woman bleeding in the street on a Sunday morning isn't a policy failure or a systemic issue to be studied. It's just cowardice, plain and simple, and it deserves to be treated that way regardless of who the victim happens to be.