We never thought we’d see the day. President Trump is wrong in claiming that “massive fraud” in Twitter’s election coverage “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He has, though, managed to get Democrats to defend the national parchment. We kid you not. Even President Biden had his spokesman speak up for the Constitution, saying ​​“You cannot only love America when you win.”

Wonders never cease. The last time we dipped our quill into this particular inkwell the mere mention of the word “constitution” would give your typical Democrat a clinical case of the fantods. One columnist, Ezra Klein, suggested in a television appearance that the Constitution, having been written more than a century ago, “has no binding power.” Salon ran over one piece a headline saying, “Let’s stop pretending the Constitution is sacred.”

Salon, a liberal publication, illustrated its story, we noted at the time, with a photograph of a protester at a Tea Party rally holding a sign that said: “I believe in the CONSTITUTION I’m a ‘right-wing extremist.’” A New York Times editorial, we also noted, called the GOP’s plans to open the 112th Congress with a reading of the Constitution and other “antics” a “ghastly waste of time.” The Daily Kos called it “the most boring circus ever.”

This is the context in which Mr. Trump is calling for the “termination” of the election rules and regulations, even those in the Constitution. Our reaction is that he’s a little late. The rules and regulations of the Constitution went by the boards years ago, at least in respect of the Democrats. The most basic provisions of the Constitution are ignored with abandon by our officials, even  Republicans all too often, and our legislators and judges.

Take your separated powers. This is the most basic constitutional principle, apart from the fact that the Constitution is a written document. Yet we’ve just come through a year in which the highest profile activity in our legislature has been prosecuting President Trump. The J6 committee hired 14 federal prosecutors, according to the Times. Yet taking care that the laws are faithfully executed is a power granted not to the Congress but to the president.

Not only that, but trial by legislature — known as attainder — is one of the powers the Constitution specifically denies to Congress. Yet in one of the gaudiest constitutional violations, the J6 Committee put the former president on trial in the legislature over the capitol riot. Such behavior is part of a pattern by the Democrats as viewing the Constitution as a set of vague guidelines, to be terminated when they conflict with the Democrats’s policy goals. 

The modern federal bureaucracy, which emerged in FDR’s New Deal, rests on a dubious reading of the parchment and its Commerce Clause, which lets Congress regulate trade “among the several states.” The legislature has taken that to imply authority to regulate even the smallest details of the daily lives of Americans, even when such activity fails to cross state lines. Obamacare is only among the most recent violations of the principle.

The cardinal constitutional violation of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration, was struck down in Schechter v. United States by a unanimous Supreme Court. The Nine took aim at regulation by bureaucrats, saying “Congress cannot delegate legislative power” by handing to the executive branch “an unfettered discretion to make whatever laws” it deems necessary. Similar scrutiny is long overdue on the Federal Reserve system.

“Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections,” Mr. Trump observes. We couldn’t agree more. Yet clearly the best way to preserve free and fair elections — and liberty more broadly — is not by suspending, ignoring, or even terminating our Constitution. The proper course, and only one, is abiding by the plain language of the parchment in the first place.