February 14, 2024

As the 2024 election approaches, the Democrats are much concerned with what they call “insurrection.” They, of course, refer to the events at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, a day that will live in political opportunism for the party now planning the reelection of Joe Biden. In addition, they use the term to refer to any public objection or legal challenge to the outcome of the 2020 election. Democrats objected in the courts or in the halls of Congress to every Republican presidential election victory of the 21st century. But that, apparently, was not insurrection.

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The events at the Capitol, so inimical to “our democracy,” greatly disturbed the Democrats. So alarmed were they and resolved to protect democracy from its assailants that they now seek to bar the lead insurrectionist, also by happenstance the presumptive Republican nominee for President, from the ballot. Donald Trump indeed stands indicted four times by Democratic prosecutors in Democratic venues as well as civilly sued for his wealth by a Democratic attorney general and a civil litigant, of late feted on MSNBC.

The indictments of Donald Trump follow hard upon a three-year campaign to imprison anyone present in the Capitol on January 6 or apparently in the immediate vicinity (other than undercover FBI operatives). Even those admitted by uniformed police officers and harming nothing and no one stand convicted and sentenced. One young man committed suicide.

There is also the prosecution and incarceration of Trump administration officials, such as Peter Navarro, incarcerated after his assertion of executive privilege before the infamous January 6 Committee, and lawyers who placed their careers and liberty in jeopardy by trying to represent President Trump (e.g., Rudolph Giuliani and Jenna Ellis). This has been a persecution under color of law not seen in this country since the Palmer Raids (the anticommunist campaign of Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, just after the First World War). 

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There was in 2020 an effort to deprive state legislatures of the power to determine the “manner” in which presidential elections are conducted, as provided in the Constitution’s Article II, sec. 1, clause 2. Democrats who cited the pandemic to justify such electoral anomalies during the 2020 election afterwards proposed legislation to make the changes permanent. They contemplate also, even if thus far without success, eliminating the Senate filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and adding the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states, in effect, packing the Senate as well.

The same Democrat party, now holding the presidency, contrives to change the electorate by opening the border to millions of immigrants, without regard to health, skills, means of support, or gang and terrorist affiliation, setting the law at naught. The consequence of this scam, perpetrated with pious invocations of Emma Lazarus’s poem, is to visit danger and hardship upon the nation’s urban population immediately, and upon the wider population in due course.

There are then the occasional experiments with the freedoms of speech and religion, conducted by, inter alia, government meddling with social media platforms and official persecution of those opposed, as matters of faith, to homosexuality, transsexuality, and abortion.

Does the current Democrat Party not expressly champion the “fundamental transformation of America,” in Barack Obama’s words?

Let us then return to the topic of insurrection. How shall we define it? Surely an insurrection is the event announced in the Declaration of Independence: the extra-legal and, if necessary, forcible alteration of political authority. How striking that the litany of wrongs there imputed to the British king suggests that he was the one who committed the initial usurpation of constitutional norms, to which the American colonists reacted.

It was the king who, for instance, “refused his Assent Laws, the most wholesome and necessary to the public good,” who “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance,” and who “combined with others to subject [the American colonists] to a jurisdiction foreign to [their] constitution, and unacknowledged by [their] laws; giving his Assent to their acts of pretended Legislation… [f]or taking away [their] Charters, abolishing [their] most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of [their] Governments.”