This Far And No Further

Five years after January 6th, Democrat state-led defiance of federal immigration law crosses the line from resistance to insurrection

Every time a conservative points out how the progressive Democrat left (the PDL for short) is actively engaged in eroding American traditions, norms, and governance—bordering on insurrection—the screaming begins.

“Trump! Fascism! J6! J6! J6! J6!”

It has taken on the form of a mystical incantation to protect the speaker from challenge.

January 6th is the linchpin of their entire effort. To them, it represents the pinnacle of insurrectionist behavior, carried out by dirty, evil, stump-toothed hillbilly Trump supporters trying to “destroy democracy” by “overturning an election.”

Democrats determined that a minority of people opposed to them did bad things, some were on the periphery of bad things, and some thought about doing bad things. Instead of sorting them out, they decided to prosecute them all in jurisdictions so politically biased that convictions and harsh sentences were all but guaranteed.

The unanswered question remains: how could an unarmed crowd—one that held a three-hour protest turned riot in a city where the Democratic Speaker of the House consciously chose not to deploy extra security until after the event—have overturned an election, permanently blocked Constitutional processes, installed a president, kept him in office, and survived reactions from the states?

All we have to go on is their word and the results of their “investigations,” which never proved how obstructing a certification vote for a few hours would have changed anything.

Largely because it didn’t and it couldn’t.

While they claim to have shown how fragile our “democracy” is, we really discovered how cowardly and petulant Democrats are and how they believe that they—not the citizens of America—solely contain American democracy within their own bloodstreams. They believed they were at personal risk, though some of the loudest voices claiming martyrdom (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) were three-quarters of a mile away in another building.

It proved how resilient our system of governance is and that it doesn’t depend on the presence of pale-skinned, Botoxed, grotesque DC Morlocks trolling the halls of Congress like ghosts at Hogwarts.

The PDL did learn a few things from the event and its aftermath.

They learned how virtually impossible it is to carry out an actual insurrection with an unarmed, unorganized mob occupying the Capitol Complex. They learned there was no appetite at the Supreme Court for getting involved in election disputes. They learned there were very few Constitutional processes to handle such an event—and those that exist can be made to look like crimes, even when their use exists in precedent (the alternate slates of electors). They learned that federalism is real—that if one is going to challenge the federal government in such a way, it must be done in the states, where real power resides. They learned that political persecution via a politicized judicial system is effective for targeting a small number of the opposition, but it doesn’t scale well.

The big lesson learned was how far they could go with Insurrection Lite as a tool for political change without paying a price. So, if you’re going to go that route, you have to go big.

Now, five years later, we have an actual budding, Democratic state-led insurrection on our hands. Perhaps it’s a manufactured crisis to hide the roles of Democratic state officials in widespread fraud—I believe that’s true in Minnesota. But regardless of genesis, the interference in the execution of federal law, the refusal to mitigate or allow the mitigation of threats to federal law enforcement officers in the prosecution of their Constitutional duties, and the actual threats by governors and state attorneys general to arrest, prosecute, and jail those same federal officials cross the line from federalism into insurrection.

Unfortunately for Democrats, there is an Act for that, and based on their reaction to January 6th, they provide a precedent to use it.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 states:

“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the prerequisites of the law in that respect.”

In my opinion, not invoking the Act is folly.

And that comes from someone who believes the Tenth Amendment is one of the most ignored parts of the Constitution. I normally detest federal interference in the business of the states—but where the “crimes” of J6 were shrouded in fog, this case is crystal clear. The Constitution and Supreme Court rulings on the federal responsibility for immigration law and its enforcement leave no wiggle room.

After J6, the Democrats tried to draw a line but failed. What they sought through inflated claims of insurrection never existed. What is ongoing in Minnesota exists. It is real.

This far and no further should be the message. Now is the time to draw that line.