If Robert Kagan hoped to generate some conversation with a lengthy Washington Post opinion piece last week, he succeeded. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for the Post, presented a provocative warning to the public, arguing that the United States faces the possibility of a “dictatorship” if Donald Trump is returned to the White House.

Sen. J.D. Vance — a former Trump critic turned sycophant — evidently wasn’t persuaded by Kagan’s case. On the contrary, the Ohio Republican this week sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken seeking some kind of investigation into the published piece. From the senator’s letter:

“I wish to address to your attention a recent opinion piece published in the pages of a widely-circulated American newspaper. Based on my review of public charging documents that the Department of Justice has filed in courts of law, I suspect that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.”

In other words, Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer, believes the Post op-ed might have crossed a legal line.

Isn’t the duty of a newspaper to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable?” This senator is way too comfortable - with a dictatorship.