How we almost lost our democracy

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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New evidence from the Jan. 6 hearings offers an up-close, chilling look at how near this nation came to a coup after the last election.

Committee members said in their initial hearing that they would deliver proof that the events leading up to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of insurgents were part of a detailed, sustained, multifaceted and illegal effort to keep former President Donald Trump in power despite his loss of the popular and electoral votes. They delivered.

Step by step, they showed that the attack was planned long before Jan. 6. They showed beyond dispute that many in Trump's inner circle attempted to dissuade him from spouting his Big Lie narrative about the "stolen election" because they knew it was false.

Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr told the committee that for Trump to believe his lie he would have to be "delusional." Trump was told repeatedly by those with knowledge of the law and the Constitution that the cockamamie, last-ditch scheme hatched by his personal attorney, John Eastman, was illegal.

Eastman, who has taught law, proposed that somehow the founders of this nation, having broken with a king, having taken so much care to forge a system of elaborate checks and balances, would have vested in the vice president the authority to unilaterally undo the results of a presidential election.

Trump was the driving force behind all of this, even though he knew that having Vice President Mike Pence halt the electoral certification to declare him the winner wouldn't fly. It was Trump who chose, as always, to ignore the facts, dismiss anything he disliked as fake news and bulldoze ahead.

Any first-year law student knows that ignorance of the law is neither an excuse nor a defense. But this wasn't ignorance of the law. This was a willful and sustained disregard for U.S. law and the Constitution itself.

The House hearings have provided ample and chilling evidence that Trump pressured Pence relentlessly in private and public, even to the point of endangering the vice president's life. Thursday's hearing juxtaposed Trump's speeches and time-stamped tweets with the advance of the mob that he had whipped to a frenzy over Pence's alleged disloyalty.

Schematics showed that the mob came frighteningly close to their objective of harming Pence, within a mere 40 feet of where the vice president was sheltered. A visibly shaken Greg Jacob, counsel to Pence at the time, testified that he heard the din of the mob but had not realized until the hearing just how close they were. Other depositions from rioters attested to the fact that they would have tried to kill Pence if given a chance.

That is how close we came to a coup.

Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, held in the highest regard by conservatives, gave damning testimony on Thursday, recounting how he counseled Pence in fending off Trump's demands.

Luttig's statement to the committee is well worth reading in its entirety. It says, in part, that Jan. 6 was "a war for America's democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political allies and his supporters." Luttig said it was part of "a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor ... ." Luttig said he considers Trump and his acolytes "a clear and present danger."

That, he said, is because "to this very day the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election."

The evidence is mounting. The warning is clear. Will America heed it?