The Democrats have 99 problems right now, with President Biden’s entire agenda in peril and the country on the verge of a debt default, so they don’t have the bandwidth to focus too much of their messaging on the coup attempt of January 6, 2021. The release of a memo from Claremont Institute senior fellow John C. Eastman has revealed the “legal” basis the Trump administration hoped to use on January 6 to steal the election. Some people are reasonably reacting with discussion of how the the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is too vague and should be strengthened to prevent future shenanigans. That’s a good idea, but a more urgent idea is not to treat this as some kind of legal argument but more like a seditious  conspiracy involving many easily identifiable bad actors who should face something on the order of the Nuremberg Trials.

Eastman’s memo was taken very seriously, and Mike Pence reportedly sought to follow its roadmap to a coup until he was talked out of by former Vice-President Dan Quayle. The key fact is that the plan depended on simply not counting the votes from seven states that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. By doing so, the threshold for victory would be reduced from 270 Electoral College votes down to 228, and Trump would win by 232 votes to 222. If the Democrats complained about this, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives where Trump could still prevail because the Republicans controlled the delegations in 26 states.

It’s not a defense that the plan was unlikely to work even if Pence initiated it. The mere expectation that Pence would initiate it caused the January 6 insurrection that resulted in several deaths, dozens of serious injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage, not to mention a mortal threat to our nation’s lawmakers.

I know that the House of Representatives has created an investigative committee that will be looking into everything that went into the January 6 insurrection, and that’s fine for what it’s worth. But this is still being treated as a hiccup rather than a betrayal on the scale of the South’s secession from the Union.

It’s critical that the country stand up for itself here and that begins by defining this as among the most serious and foul crimes ever committed in this country, and the perpetrators need to be treated as enemies of the state on a par with war criminals.