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MINOT, N.D. — Thanks in no small part to the Jan. 6 committee in Congress, we're all aware of the lengths former President Donald Trump and his supporters went to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
One of our national institutions, in this instance the Electoral College, produced an outcome Trump and company didn't like, so instead of accepting their defeat, and focusing on the next election, they attacked the institution itself.
How is that any different than the left's attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Roe v. Wade precedent?
Show me the intellectual daylight between Trump leaning on Vice President Mike Pence to set aside the Electoral College outcome, and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanding "consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and the hostile takeover of our democratic institutions."
Ocasio-Cortez argues that the court, somehow, “dramatically overreached its authority” by overturning its own precedent (if the Supreme Court can't overturn Supreme Court precedent, who can?).
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She's telling anyone who will listen that the highest court in the land has a “crisis of legitimacy." She's demanding retribution be exercised on the court for producing an outcome she doesn't like.
This is Trumpism, writ in the language of the left.
Our progressive friends may not want to hear that, but it's true.
And while left-wing activists upset about the Dobbs decision haven't done anything like storming the capitol building in Washington, D.C., they have targeted the private homes of the justices .
A man with assassination on his mind was arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh's home .
One of the most troubling trends in American politics today is not the vociferous debate over issues like election integrity or abortion, but this willingness to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of our institutions when they don't reach a conclusion some political faction wants.
I'm not just talking about bombastic politicians on talking head shows.
Left-wing prosecutors in states that have bans on abortion have announced they won't enforce those bans . According to the Associated Press, right-wing sheriffs candidates across the country, people calling themselves "constitutional sheriffs," are saying they won't enforce laws, such as gun control measures, that they don't like either.
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Folks, that's not how it works.
Yet, the motivations in each of these instances, from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to the "constitutional sheriffs," are the same.
These are all people who want to take a shortcut around the hard work of democracy. Debating and persuading on issues like guns and abortions is really hard. Winning elections is hard, too.
It's much easier to claim the right to ignore the outcomes you don't like, whether they're emerging from a court or a legislature or the ballot box, based on some tortured argument about legitimacy or cheating.
Democracy doesn't just mean participating in the political process. It also means abiding by the outcomes of that process, even when you're on the losing end.
The most dangerous trend in America right now is the growing number of people who refuse to accept that.
