Michael Flynn meets Alexander Hamilton

Even the Washington Examiner realized this was sedition! Democracies have always died at some point. The Federalists worried that they could never survive because they had never survived. Ours has always depended on certain constitutional norms that insured the peaceful transfer of power. More than anything else, our democracy has avoided the fate of others because we have accepted the constitutional processes that ensure that our regime is based, to use Hamilton’s words, on “reflection and choice” rather than on “accident and force.” The founders’ Constitution separated us from prior democracies because it created institutions through which the democracy could exercise choice. Biden was elected by a constitutional process. The people exercised the choice made possible for them by the Constitution. Calling new elections after you lost the last one is one of those tactics that we created a Constitution to avoid; it can only be sustained by “accident and force.” It would mean the willful decision not to follow the people’s choice, as guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Going down this route is, by definition, the death of our constitutional democracy. These people are playing with fire. Either they don’t realize how tenuous constitutional democracy actually is, or they do and they actually want to be autocrats.

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