WASHINGTON — It has been quite the week in Congress, with lawmakers battling over a forced impeachment resolution for President Donald Trump, partisan squabbling, and rampant infighting within the House Democratic Caucus.

Things have become so vexed in the Capitol that Rev. Patrick Conroy, the House of Representatives’ official chaplain and a Jesuit priest, prayed to “cast out all spirits of darkness” on the House floor Thursday morning during his opening prayer.

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“This has been a difficult and contentious week in which darker spirits seem to have been at play in the people’s House,” Conroy said. “In your most holy name, I now cast out all spirits of darkness from this chamber. Spirits not from You.”

“I cast out the spirit of discouragement, which deadens the hope of those who are of good will,” he added. “I cast out the spirit of petty divisiveness, which clouds the sense and the desire to be of fruitful productivity in addressing the issues more appropriately before this House. I cast out any sadness brought on by the frustration of dealing with matters detrimental to the honorable work each member has been called to engage in.”

Conroy then prayed to God to “anoint your servants here in the House with a healing balm to comfort and renew the souls of all in this assembly.”

“May your spirit of wisdom and patience descend upon all so that any spirit of darkness might have no place in our midst,” he added.

Conroy typically leads the opening prayer on the House floor, while leaders of other religious groups will often take his place to perform as guests.

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The last time Conroy made headlines was in the spring of 2018, when then-House Speaker Paul Ryan attempted to fire him as House chaplain. According to several lawmakers at the time, Ryan became frustrated with one of Conroy’s prayers in which he called for a fair tax code while Republicans were pushing through their landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Conroy ultimately rescinded the resignation that Ryan had requested after many members of Congress came to his defense. He then continued in his role as House chaplain, a position he has held since 2011.

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Con Edison is still baffled over what caused the weekend’s major blackout — and warned on Monday that more outages could be coming with a heat wave on the way.

“We expect that there could be service outages — those things happen during heat waves,” the power company’s chief spokesman, Mike Clendenin, said during a morning appearance on PIX11.

Insisting that the company invests $2 billion every year to prepare for soaring electricity demands when the mercury rises, Clendenin claimed Con Ed will be “prepared.”

“We know it’s going to be intense,” he said of forecasts predicting temperatures reaching 100 degrees this week. “This heat wave coming up is something else and we’ve got to get ready for it.”

But he admitted that engineers still have no idea what caused Saturday’s outage that left 73,000 without power in Manhattan.

“We are very, very focused on examining exactly what transpired and caused that outage,” Clendenin told the station, saying they have no idea why breakers “did not isolate the problem” of a “significant” transmission disturbance.

“There’s a lot of patience and poise that New Yorkers displayed during the outage itself. The same kind of patience and diligence is gonna be needed as engineers and experts dive into the date and actually analyze how equipment tripped off, or what went wrong, that led to the large outage,” said Clendenin. “Unfortunately, with outages like this, it takes a little bit of time and understanding.”

Confirming that the blackout was not connected to heat or overusage, he said that “fortunately, there was no major or extensive damage” — conceding that that would have left the power out for even longer.

Clendenin tried to shake off criticism of the company — with Gov. Andrew Cuomo warning Con Ed “can be replaced” — by insisting that it provides “the absolute best grid that New Yorkers expect and deserve.”

“In fact, New York’s grid is probably better than any other grid you’ll find anywhere else in the United States,” he told PIX11, saying they were “open to anyone’s ideas” on becoming even better.

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Midtown Manhattan was surreal Saturday night.

The center of our little island is supposed to be the center of the universe — yet I am writing this after eating a lukewarm peach for dinner by (hot) candlelight in 90-degree temperatures with the windows shut tight, racing against time to finish it before my computer runs out of its last moments of electricity.

Yes, we want to be the center of finance, tech and media, but we cannot even keep the lights on for a Saturday evening. Meanwhile, our fearless leader, Mayor Bill de Blasio, is radioing it all in from Iowa, where they have plenty of power.

Yesterday, at about 7 p.m., the lights in our apartment just west of Midtown flickered — hard.

We had seen this before. This past winter — Feb. 16, to be exact — as my husband and I were eating dinner, our lights went out, then went back on.

We looked at each other and then suddenly, boom! A manhole had exploded right outside our window. The next two manholes exploded in succession, each boom rattling the windows harder, and sending our next-door neighbor, two small dogs in tow, over to ask what she should do.

Our answer: nothing. The entire street in front of us was in raging flames; even the firefighters were standing well behind their trucks, which were well behind the fire, waiting for a good half-hour for Con Ed to turn off the power before they could put water on it. We couldn’t evacuate directly into a fire; we just stood, far from the windows … and the lights didn’t go out.

That incident took, maybe, half an hour, but it has caused months of chaos since then. Con Ed has spent the last five months digging up our street — 50th Street, just a five-minute walk west of the business capital of the nation — and refilling it, sometimes digging and refilling on the same day, trying to replace yards of burned-out infrastructure across two blocks while still allowing car and truck traffic to snake by. They work during the day; they startle us by waking us up in the middle of the night with klieg lights.

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Video shows moment lights turn back on after NYC blackout

I have no idea if a Saturday night 49th Street substation “incident” — not far from our little one in February — has anything to do with the fact that Con Ed has been desperately digging up our street, one block north, for half a year.

I do know that our infrastructure is fragile — and our emergency response is inadequate. Walking around Midtown Saturday evening was an exercise in picking which dystopia you wanted to focus on.

Thousands of people spilled out of canceled theater performances — spilling into streets and avenues, where they were vulnerable to a wave of cars, buses and trucks moving past nonworking traffic signals, should this have been a terror attack.

Diesel generators kicked in at the World Wide Plaza office building on the West Side, spewing toxic fumes for more than an hour into the windows of nearby elderly tenement residents just a few hundred feet away

Their choice was to shelter in the heat or breathe in poison — this, 12 years after New York supposedly designed a “sustainable” plan for the environment.

Times Square was half-dark and half-light, depending on what venues had invested in generators that, long-term, make the island even hotter for people without air conditioning.

The MTA did a truly heroic job in getting trains stuck in tunnels to the next station so that people could clamber upstairs, but the power cut in Midtown meant that a dozen lines — traveling from Brooklyn to The Bronx — were paralyzed. You weren’t going anywhere if couldn’t go through Manhattan.

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