There is a possibly apocryphal story that, upon surrendering to the American revolutionaries at the Battle of Yorktown, General Cornwallis instructed the British Army band to play “The World Turned Upside Down”. The situation must certainly have seemed so to the British, smugly certain of victory against the colonists, whom they deemed to be mere rabble—the “Deplorables” of their day. These farmers, laborers, and small business owners certainly must have seemed to be no match for the power and glory of the Empire at the very peak of its influence.

The world has now turned upside for a great many people who were convinced the sun would never set on the D.C. empire of ever-expanding government and regulation fueled by ever-increasing tax hikes and federal bureaucracy. Watching the sea of exceedingly sour Democratic faces during President Trump’s State of the Union address last week, it was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for those who still cannot seem to reconcile themselves to the new reality. This perhaps helps to explain the policies and positions now shrilly advocated by the Democratic minority that seem so at odds with both their party’s historical norms and current rhetoric.

I grew up with a Democratic Party aligned to the interests of blue collar workers. This stance obviously translated into policies that put cash into the pockets of the hard-working middle class that created so much of our nation’s prosperity through both their labor and personal spending. Although I realize the Democrats many years ago morphed into the party of Silicon Valley and Wall Street—it is no mere coincidence that Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco and Charles Schumer is from New York—I believe their implacable opposition to the business and personal tax cuts recently enacted by the Republican Congress is spectacularly suicidal. Staking out an unyielding position against a bill that is already driving capital investments by businesses, prompting many corporations to hand out immediate cash bonuses to their employees, and reducing the federal tax bite for the vast majority of workers seems difficult to understand except as a short-sighted defense of overpaid D.C. bureaucrats instead of our tax-weary citizenry. For someone old enough to remember the Democratic Party as it used to be, this seems an upside down reality.

By the same token, it is probable that several shelves of books will someday be written to explain the Democratic somersault on the subject of illegal immigration. Democrats have somehow quickly moved from President Obama’s early vows to crack down on illegals to a current advocacy—if not outright endorsement—of sneaking into the United States and staying here. This stunning change in perspective among Democratic lawmakers is, in addition, today conjoined with a reflexive support for unabated migration from nations known to support terrorism. One has to wonder how Democrats plan to win back voters who don’t live in. . . San Francisco or New York. Watching so much of the nation’s electoral map turn Republican red two Novembers ago should have been sufficient to convince all but the most ideologically blinded to reconsider extremist immigration policies that helped put their party out of power—but it seems that upside down is the position still preferred by many Democratic loyalists.

By the same token the Democratic Party’s loud defenses of both the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, both of whom recently seem to be executing their investigative duties in manners that should raise the eyebrows of all but the most extreme partisans, also appear quite odd when put in historical context. I am old enough to remember when liberal Democrats (Is there any other kind today?) deeply distrusted the FBI and its motivations. Moreover, one need only glance back at the Clinton presidency to discern a very different attitude toward special investigations with elastic and expansive mandates.

The dead end search for Russian collusion in the 2016 election now seems to have mutated into an endless fishing expedition—accompanied by far too many self-serving and inflammatory leaks to the press—that serves to provide the unending appearance of wrongdoing in the absence of actual evidence. One need only to flashback to Kenneth Starr and his dim-witted defense of democracy, which eventually took the form of prosecuting the President of the United States for Oval Office nookie, to wonder what has snapped inside Mr. Mueller’s Democratic cheerleaders, who seem to have completely forgotten the damage done by odd investigative zealotry just a couple of decades in the past. Reality again lands bottom side up.

There is, however, one ongoing investigation in Washington that has real potential to be a political—and perhaps Constitutional—bombshell. Someday soon the Inspector General for the Department of Justice will be releasing a report regarding the FBI investigation of the Hillary Clinton email scandal—and the inexplicable assertion by former FBI Director James Comey that no federal laws were violated by either Secretary Clinton or her associates. If the Inspector General’s report were to show that the highest law enforcement officials in our nation were in fact tailoring their investigations and prosecutorial recommendations to help throw a U.S. Presidential election to one candidate over another, that would be a crisis of monumental proportions that would compel swift action to restore the integrity of our federal government.

Failing this were it to be necessary, our faith and trust in the guarantees embodied in the Constitution would be turned upside down, inside out, and shaken to the core. We cannot allow this to occur.