On January the 27th, 1838, before the young men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, a 28-year-old

Abraham Lincoln delivered what we now call the Lyceum address. He warned, quote, if destruction be our lot,

we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time

or die by suicide, end quote. Lincoln was not warning about foreign invasion. He was warning

about national self-destruction.

Nearly 188 years later, Judge J. Michael Ludig has issued a warning of his own.

Not about armies abroad, not about adversaries overseas, but about constitutional erosion from

within. Ludig, you will remember, is a modern-day patriot. He had foreknowledge of the

plan to upend the results of the 2020 election. He also said January 6th was no riot, no protest that

spun out of control. January 6th was the entirely predictable culmination of a deliberate lie,

the lie that the election of 2020 had been stolen. It was a sophisticated and coordinated effort

to disrupt and potentially discard a lawful and peaceful transfer of power. In the hours before

January 6, Judge Ludig advised Vice President Mike Pence that the Constitution did not

permit the election to be overturned. Lutig did not equivocate. He did not invent some

authority. He simply upheld the law, not because doing so would be a popular move for a longtime

conservative Republican jurist because it wasn't. That move cost him friends and earned him death

threats. Lutig did it because it was right. Last week, when accepting

honorary membership in the New York City Bar Association, Judge Lutig, drew a straight line

from that moment, January 6th, to this one. He argues that we never fully reckoned with what January

6th represented, not politically, not legally, not culturally, and that failure to reckon

with it is not new in our history. In fact, at the founding of the Republic, Thomas Payne warned what

happens when power is abused and left unanswered. In 1776, he wrote,

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