JAN. 6: Listen to Luttig

In last Friday’s My Turn column in The Press, Brent Regan disputed that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were an existential threat to democracy itself asserting, “any claim that a group of unarmed protesters occupying any public building can pose a serious threat to democracy is absurd on its face.”

To the contrary! Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, who is widely regarded as the preeminent conservative Republican legal scholar in the country, had this to say in his written statement to the Jan. 6 committee:

• “A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on Jan. 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge.”

• “The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on Jan. 6 was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost and steal America’s democracy.”

• “On Jan. 6, 2021, revolutionaries, not patriots, assaulted America and American democracy. The walls of all three of our institutions of democracy were scaled and breached on that appalling day.”

All Americans should heed Judge Luttig’s chilling admonition:

“If we fail to learn the lessons that are there to be learned, or worse, deny even that there are lessons there to be learned, we will consign ourselves to another Jan. 6 in the not-too-distant future, and another after that, and another after that.”

JIM DUFF

Coeur d’Alene