Hawley, then a law professor, recounts the story of the election of 1800 at length in the 2012 piece: the famously bitter campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over what exactly the federal government’s scope and purpose should be, the attempts to portray Jefferson as an atheist Jacobin, the Federalist Party’s strategy to deny him the presidency through the first version of the Electoral College system, the contemporaneous concerns about civil war breaking out, and, finally, the Federalists’s voluntary concession to the reality of Jefferson’s victory. Paraphrasing Jefferson, Hawley writes that “if the contending parties agreed to respect the basic system of government the Constitution had created, however, these principled differences could be settled by something far short of revolution or coup d'état: They could be settled by democratic election.”This story, in Hawley’s piece, elucidates a distinction he draws between constitutional law and constitutional politics (the majority deciding the broader interpretation or implementation of the constitution) that, I suppose, you could twist to rationalize his recent objection to election certification. Reading back through pieces about civic society, liberty, justice, and the Constitution written years ago by Hawley (or, really, anyone) the week after a mob riot overtook the Capitol is like that part in “The White Album” when Joan Didion can’t look at her mother-in-law’s framed blessing (“And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin”) because it seems like the “ironic” detail that reporters would include in the story if they were all found murdered.