POLITICS: With anti-ICE fury, Democrats are playing with fire

Democrats are playing with fire, but it’s the whole country that’s likely to get burned.

For a democratic republic to function, you need certain key elements. 

First, elections must be generally regarded as honest. 

Second, candidates and their supporters have to abide by the results of those elections when they occur.

Third, winners of elections must not behave in a way that makes losing the contest a matter of life and death (or lifetime imprisonment).

Democrats are undermining — or just outright wrecking — all three.

On the electoral trustworthiness front, Democrats are standing united against measures to ensure that only legitimate voters can cast votes, and that the votes cast are counted honestly and transparently.

When it comes to abiding by elections, the Democrats have treated President Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2024 as illegitimate. (In fairness, he did the same in 2020 — but accepted Joe Biden’s presidency after Inauguration Day.)

In Trump’s first term, Democrats formed a “resistance” movement — as if the administration of a duly elected president was analogous to a German occupation government in World War II — and pushed the patently false claim that his victory was a “hacked election” or the product of (nonexistent) “Russian collusion.” 

In his second term, the “resistance” is expanding, with suggestions that Trump is ruling as a “king” — and now with the often violent protests aiming to block the legitimate enforcement of duly enacted immigration laws. 

Democratic governors and mayors in Minnesota, Oregon and Illinois have gone so far as to actively enable the chaos by withdrawing police protection.  

Finally, winners of elections must not pose an existential threat to the losers; they can’t carry out, or even hint at, mass imprisonment or blanket prosecution.  

Take a lesson from history: Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon to seize power in Rome because his political enemies were plotting to subject him to political prosecutions that could have led to his death or exile.  

Caesar saved himself (for a while) — but his action, and the behavior of his opponents that triggered it, killed off the Roman Republic.

Historically in American politics, electoral losers have accepted the results, however grudgingly, and concentrated on winning the next election. 

This new trend of treating Republican electoral victories as inherently illegitimate is a departure — and very dangerous.

It’s made more dangerous by widespread threats from important Democratic figures to prosecute not only Trump and his administration, but lower-level officials — and now, even federal law enforcement agents. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been raising this specter for months, and other prominent leftists are following his lead.

In September, Jeffries said Democrats would prosecute members of Trump’s Justice Department once they regain power: “Donald Trump and this toxic administration will be long gone, but there will still be accountability to be had.”

In December, he issued a message on X to “all these GOP extremists and [Trump] sycophants … the statute of limitations is 5 years! It will be well beyond the end of the Trump admin.”

We’ve heard similar statements from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Democratic consultant James Carville and ex-CNN gadfly Jim Acosta. 

This month, the drumbeat got louder amid stepped-up immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, Minn.

Leftist commentator Jennifer Welch recently used her podcast to push “relentless” prosecutions of Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and other Republicans if Democrats regain power, arguing it would be necessary for “true national reconciliation.”

And just last week Jeffries was back warning rank-and-file ICE officers to expect a Democratic administration to prosecute them for any crimes it could discover (or perhaps, given the history of efforts to prosecute Trump in the past, invent).

“Every single one of these people who we see brutalizing the American people, they’re gonna be held accountable,” Jeffries said of ICE agents.

As Caesar’s experience demonstrates, you can’t have a democratic republic if every election is an existential struggle in which the loser risks extinction. 

People don’t want to be rendered extinct, and they can be expected to take steps to prevent it.

If Democrats keep up this thuggery, Republicans will be all but forced to respond in their own defense — and any action they may take could destabilize the nation even further.

The last time such a breach happened in the United States was in 1860, when pro-slavery Democrats seceded from the country rather than abide by the results of a presidential election. 

That resulted in a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastated much of the nation — a war driven by Southern “fire-eater” rhetoric that’s not unlike what we’re hearing from some Democrats today.

It needs to stop, or the consequences might be much worse this time around.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.