In the long ago of my teenage youth (no, not yesterday), I had a book report assignment due in my 8th-grade English class.
My choice of books was the then-bestseller of the moment — a book that was getting so many real-life headlines that two years later, there was the inevitable Hollywood movie, replete with a cast of the then-A-list stars of the day.
The book I chose was a then-bestselling political thriller: Seven Days in May.
Spoiler alert.
The story revolves around a liberal president, Jordan Lyman (played by Fredric March), who has signed a highly controversial nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The president’s decision has drawn huge controversy, replete with protests around the country descending into violence.
One of the leading opponents of the treaty signing is the decidedly well-known U.S. Air Force General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) — the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Scott and his colleagues in the Joint Chiefs have decided enough is enough, and seven days down the road, they are secretly planning a military coup d’etat to overthrow the elected President Lyman and throw out the treaty.
An aide to General Scott, one Marine Colonel Martin “Jiggs” Casey (Kirk Douglas) is a straight arrow who has been kept out of the coup plotters’ plan, and now slowly discovers it. Angry and shaken, Colonel Casey makes it his business to secretly inform President Lyman of what is afoot.
With that the president uses Colonel Casey and a couple others of his close allies, including a sitting U.S. Senator, to quietly gather the evidence against General Scott over the next seven days (the coup is set to take place on the seventh day) and halt the plot in its tracks without revealing what had been going on to the public, which would, fears the president, signal a decided American weakness to its enemies around the world. This being the 1960s, the primary enemy, of course, was the then very much in existence Soviet Union.
In real life of the day, the Cold War between the Soviets and the United States was in reality a major fact of life in the world. In 1961, the Kennedy administration had launched a failing invasion of Communist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. By October of 1962, the world came as close to nuclear war as had ever been experienced when the U.S. discovered the Russians had been secretly shipping and installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, a mere 90 miles from Florida in the U.S.
Which is to say, there were enough real-life Cold War tensions unfolding that the scenario created in Seven Days in May seemed all too real.
There they are, looking Americans straight in the eye and speaking the language of sedition.
All of this comes vividly to mind as the headlines produce this video from six real-life Congressional Democrats — whom The Times reports “all served in the military or the intelligence community” — behaving in a manner that recalls those Seven Days in May coup plotters. (RELATED: ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously?)
There they are, looking Americans straight in the eye and speaking the language of sedition. There they are, just like the fictional General Scott, threatening to call a president’s actions illegal and vowing to oppose — overthrow? — those actions because they disagree with them.
Safe to say, one suspects lots of Americans have had it with this business of Democrats threatening the government because they don’t like the winner of the last presidential election. Were these people elected? Yes. But so too was President Trump.
And it is simply dangerous for elected officials to threaten the elected president of the United States by telling the honorable men and women in the American military and intelligence communities that obeying a presidential order is illegal or worse, criminal.
This is clearly a seditious summons for the military to disobey a constitutional presidential order issued by the constitutionally protected president.
If they want to disagree with a presidential order — fine. Take to the floor of the House or Senate, give your speech, and put out a press release. But this is a democracy, and urging members of the United States military to deliberately disobey a constitutional order from their commander-in-chief is nothing less than a call to sedition.
If, in fact, a member of the military feels strongly enough that a presidential order is unconstitutional, then they are quite free to do the honorable and right thing — quit. And then take their case to the American public using their free speech.
Until that moment, per the Constitution of the United States, members of the United States military are constitutionally bound to obey their commander-in-chief.
The urging of Democrat members of Congress to believe otherwise notwithstanding.
This is, it should not be necessary to say, real life in a constitutional republic.
Not the sedition of Seven Days in May.
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, 2025-11-21 03:07:00, 
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