Some people believe “we have a constitutional right to overthrow a tyrannical government. And we need to stop at that moment [for] a little history lesson. We have a right, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 explains, to overthrow a government that is not meeting the people’s needs. That is a fundamental Lockean premise of American Democracy.
However, the 1787 Constitution is the rules that we play by. And we do not have a right to overthrow that constitution and hope to retain it and hope to still make us the United States of America. If people, God forbid, want to actually have a revolution, they need to recognize that they can no longer carry the American flag. They can no longer call themselves citizens of the United States of America. ... Remember, people at the Declaration of Independence recognized that what they were doing was treason and that the punishment for treason is death.
~ Jeffery Engle, Historian at Southern Methodist University, JANUARY 14, 2021 on MPR News with Kerri Miller
