This Is What Regime Change Feels Like - POLITICO

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One day before a political mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, a less violent breach of norms dominated the day in a different capitol building, a hundred miles away. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the ceremonial swearing-in of recently elected state senators, the chamber’s Republican majority refused to seat a Democratic colleague because his Republican opponent was still trying to challenge his certified election win in court. When the chamber’s presiding officer—Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, also a Democrat—declared that motion out of order, the Republicans voted to remove him and hand parliamentary control to the Senate’s senior Republican, essentially taking control of the chamber.

Commentators described the events as ominous: a legislative majority using its brute power to deny the choice of the actual voters of Pennsylvania’s 45th District—who, as of today, still have no state senator. The Harrisburg power play lacked the dramatic violence of the assault on the U.S. Capitol one day later, but it was shocking in its own way, not least because the people breaking the norms were elected legislators and not a mob of outsiders.

As unusual as it seemed, however, it wasn’t entirely unprecedented. The Pennsylvania Statehouse had seen something like it before, more than 200 years ago. And although the eighteenth-century incident that this week’s Harrisburg antics evoke might seem like a humorous historical anecdote now, it also shows why conduct of the kind that occurred in the Pennsylvania Senate this week is genuine cause for worry—and more related than it might seem to the mob scene in Washington one day later.

The year was 1787, and the issue was whether to ratify the new U.S. Constitution. Congress had sent the proposed new Constitution to the state legislatures and asked them to hold ratifying conventions. In Pennsylvania, a small majority in the Legislature favored the new Constitution. But the sizable minority opposed to it was determined to prevent the state from ratifying. Lacking the votes to defeat a resolution calling a ratifying convention, the minority members decided simply to prevent any legislative business at all. Rather than accept a loss, they refused to show up to the chamber, denying the majority the quorum necessary to do business.

It probably seemed like a smart tactic. But the Constitution’s supporters were as determined to have their way as the opponents were to have theirs. So several supporters of the majority went to the Philadelphia boardinghouse where two of the absent opponents resided, physically seized them, dragged them into the legislative chamber, and forcibly prevented them from leaving the room, thus creating the minimum attendance necessary for a quorum.

The game wasn’t quite up, though. One of the anti-ratification legislators who had been dragged back to the chamber cleverly announced that he was then and there resigning his seat. That way, he figured, he could deny the Legislature a quorum even though his body was physically present. But the presiding officer, who was a member of the pro-ratification majority, declared the attempted resignation ineffective. (The grounds of that decision were not quite clear.) That preserved the quorum. The Legislature proceeded to call a convention, and Pennsylvania ratified the Constitution.

Many people react to stories about such historical shenanigans with a worldly-wise smile and a sense that the moral of the story is that nothing so new or worrisome is happening now, even if it looks like normal order is breaking down. After all, the thinking goes, people have done things like this in politics forever. In fact, someone might say with respect to the Pennsylvania story from 1787, it’s a good thing that stuff like this happens sometimes: We wouldn’t have gotten the Constitution without it.

There’s an important piece of truth in the idea that sometimes big good things come into the world only by bending or even breaking the rules—as the Constitution certainly did. But that lens misses something equally important, which is that the big things that come about that way aren’t always good. The reason both sides went to extremes in the Pennsylvania Statehouse in 1787 was that the stakes of the issue dividing them were nothing less than regime change. One side—the pro-Constitution side—thought the old system wasn’t working and wanted a better one. The other side wanted to preserve the old system at all costs. Given the stakes, either side was willing to pull out all the stops to prevent an outcome it didn’t want.

In other words, the 1787 story doesn’t show that such antics are normal. If anything, it shows that they’re something to worry about. The parties to that conflict were right to think that their system was breaking down. That was the whole goal. We don’t worry about that breakdown in hindsight, because we celebrate the system that replaced it: the U.S. Constitution. But from the perspective of 1787, getting to the Constitution wasn’t everything is fine business as usual. It was regime change.

There is an important moral distinction between parliamentary hardball and physical violence. But we cannot understand or properly address Wednesday’s tragedy without reckoning with its relationship to Tuesday’s farce. The mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol didn’t come out of nowhere. It was nurtured and encouraged by the president and other Republican leaders and right-wing activists who refused to accept their electoral losses according to the normal rules of the game. And when national leadership communicates that one should fight by any means necessary rather than let the other side notch its electoral wins, the predictable result is a wide variety of foul play—often nonviolent, but not always.

World history contains images of regime change that involve the violent storming of government buildings; our own national history involves regime change achieved through hardball that looks more like what happened in Harrisburg. We are now experiencing both of those things simultaneously, and not by coincidence. It’s precisely when we no longer agree that the system we have is worth preserving that people are most willing to do all sorts of things—things that seem crazy in normal times—to have their views prevail. The lesson of 1787 isn’t that sometimes politicians play hardball: It’s that this is what happens when the system itself is at stake.

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