The New Bipartisan Bill to Prevent Another Jan. 6 Would Actually Work

In the presidential election of 2020, the United States was the target of a legal coup for the first time in its history. Legal coups don’t rely on tanks rolling through the streets, and their damage to democracy is not—for the most part—measured in a body count. Legal coups don’t even cancel elections. They manipulate them.

The insidious danger of legal coups is that they come clothed in arcane procedures instead of military fatigues. Their foot soldiers are lawyers, not storm troopers. How many people would watch the House Select Committee’s January 6th hearings if there had been no violence in the Capitol, only byzantine legal machinations? But the peculiar power of legal coups is also their profound weakness. An attempt to overthrow the democratic order that is purportedly executed within the four corners of a piece of parchment can also be prevented by changing the words written on it.