Opening Remarks: 2022 Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to AEI for our Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture. I’m Robert Doar.

For some time now, AEI has held this lecture to give a platform to defenders of the United States Constitution. In doing so, we celebrate Dr. Berns, the late AEI scholar, and carry on his work promoting our nation’s founding virtues. 

Decades before he became our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. At that time, mob violence between abolitionists and their enemies was rampant, and often, retribution replaced justice. At the Lyceum, Lincoln gave direct instructions to his fellow countrymen: “Let every American, every lover of liberty,” Lincoln said, “swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”

As AEI scholar Diana Schaub has written, President Lincoln’s words provided a straightforward, two-word answer to the unrest of his times: “absolute law-abidingness.” To Lincoln, lawlessness could not be tolerated. 

Lincoln’s antidote to widespread disregard for the rule of law is a feeling of reverence for the body of laws that help govern our republic. We should feel that reverence because of the rights and freedoms our laws protect.

Over the past few years, lawlessness has played a growing and increasingly accepted role in our public life. We have seen prosecutors unwilling to press charges against mobs that burned homes and businesses throughout our cities. There has been the increasing use of violence and threats of violence against political opponents. There has been a breakdown of the rule of law in our immigration practices and procedures. And we have seen a refusal to accept the results of a lawfully conducted election. 

Not far from here, the facade of the Justice Department building reads, “Law alone can give us freedom.” I have known those words for a long time. And to me, they are the key to how our nation has resolved crises, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War, from the “revolution by law” of the Civil Rights Movement to the successful reduction in crime in America’s cities in the late 1990s.

The lesson from our history is simple: The rule of law makes liberty and prosperity possible. And if we undermine the rule of law, we place our experiment in self-government at risk.

So, it is with President Lincoln’s words and example informing us that we welcome Rep. Liz Cheney to AEI this evening. 

Rep. Cheney knows the importance of the rule of law—how essential it is to our freedom—and she has taken positions based on that principle. In Congress, she has defended the constitutional order that makes our liberty possible. That’s why I’m proud to welcome her to the stage to deliver our 2022 Walter Berns Constitution Day Lecture. 

Rep. Cheney, you have the floor.