#j michael luttig

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/9/2023

Fifth Place: Ann Coulter

Did you know that The New York Times is plotting against Ron DeSantis? If not, then you didn't read Ann Coulter's new column, where she writes:

Right now, nothing would help the Democratic Party more than somehow blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida from becoming the Republican presidential nominee.

The Democratic Party doesn't have to block DeSantis, the Republican base has already done that for them. As established, DeSantis has been polling a distant second to Trump the entire race--and even that's starting to get rather difficult for DeSantis to maintain. The New York Times doesn't need to plot against him anymore than they needed to plot against Bill Weld in 2020.

Fourth Place: J. Michael Luttig

The retired right-wing judge was on CNN today, where he said the following:

Frankly, I don’t care about the Republican Party at all, except to the extent that the two political parties in America are the political guardians of democracy in our country. American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties. So, today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.

This notion that we somehow have to bail out the Republican Party because having two parties is needed for democracy is utter nonsense. It would be no different than somebody making the same comment about the Whig Party, the Federalist Party, or the Democratic Republicans. The Anti-Masonic Party dissolving did not turn us into a one party state, nor did the end of the Know Nothing Party.

In truth, we already have multiple political parties outside of the main two--the Libertarians could take a chance in Congress, as could the Green Party, and the Reform Party, and the Right to Life Party, and the Socialist Party, and tons of others. The end of the Republican Party will not mean perpetual Democratic rule, it will mean a new party will finally have the chance to rise from the ashes.

Third Place: Mike Pence

Did you know Joe Biden launched a war on gas? That's what Mike Pence declares in a new video where he badly attempts to look like he's filling a pickup truck. Of course, the rise in gas prices since 2020 has to do primarily with the fact that people are--you know--actually driving now and weren't back then, the COVID-19 pandemic caused people to travel much less. (One person told me the roads were so clear a previously hour and a half long car trip took them fifteen minutes.) It's this thing called supply and demand, when demand increases and supply doesn't prices go up because the amount people are willing to pay goes up.

Oh, and if Biden is declaring some kind of war on energy, somebody should really consider telling the President given he has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public land than Trump--wrongfully in my opinion.

Second Place: Nick Akerman

If you're like me, you think the Donald Trump trial should be televised--that is not the opinion of Nick Akerman, who wrote an article from The New York Times with headline of "Why Televising the Trump Trial Is a Bad Idea." You see, although the media has felt the need to televise every trial it thinks it can sensationalize that it comes across, it seems like the one which would actually change the lives of the American people needs to be behind closed doors. Public transparency is only for OJ Simpson, not for the former President.

Actually, the article mentions the OJ trial, and Akerman says:

A major lesson from the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which gripped the nation when it was broadcast starting in 1995, is how the impact of television can undermine a trial when the judge, the lawyers, the defendant and the witnesses play to the viewing audience, as they did then. This turned a grave murder trial, with Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence hanging in the balance, into daily entertainment.

Given how OJ Simpson is now one of the most hated men in America as he had been since the start of the trial, it seems rather surprising that Akerman is saying televising this trial would somehow help Donald Trump.

Winner: Matt Walsh

White people are not going extinct, despite what Matt Walsh will tell you. A recent article in The Hill did find that white people might not be a majority in this country come from twenty years from now, but that does not mean we will be losing white people. In spite of that, Matt did a long rant on his show today about how white people could be going extinct in the near future.

I will not be reprinting that rant, because it is nothing short of the rantings of a deranged racist--but I will say it is based on a total misunderstanding of data, one I do not believe was unintentional.

Matt Walsh, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[don-lichterman]

Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig's Testimony

Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig’s Testimony

Anna MoneymakerGetty Images Oddly, the most eloquent moment in Thursday’s hearing before the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 came before anyone sat down before a microphone. Prior to the opening of the hearing, retired conservative federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a man who’s at least twice come within an ace of the Supreme Court, released his opening statement…

[not-safe-for-democracy]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Drew Sheneman, The Star-Ledger

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

AUG 20, 2023

Various constitutional lawyers have been weighing in lately on whether former president Donald Trump and others who participated in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election are disqualified from holding office under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The third section of that amendment, ratified in 1868, reads: 

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

On August 14 an article forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by William Baude of the University of Chicago Law School and Michael S. Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas School of Law became available as a preprint. It argued that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment is still in effect (countering arguments that it applied only to the Civil War era secessionists), that it is self-executing (meaning the disqualification of certain people is automatic, much as age limits or residency requirements are), and that Trump and others who participated in trying to steal the 2020 presidential election are disqualified from holding office.

This paper was a big deal because while liberal thinkers have been making this argument for a while now, Baude and Paulsen are associated with the legal doctrine of originalism, an approach to the law that insists the Constitution should be understood as those who wrote its different parts understood them. That theory gained traction on the right in the 1980s as a way to push back against what its adherents called “judicial activism,” by which they meant the Supreme Court’s use of the law, especially the Fourteenth Amendment, to expand the rights of minorities and women. One of the key institutions engaged in this pushback was the Federalist Society, and both Baude and Paulson are associated with it. 

Now the two have made a 126-page originalist case that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Trump from running for president. Their interpretation is undoubtedly correct. But that interpretation has even larger implications than they claim.

Moderate Republicans—not “Radical Republicans,” by the way, which was a slur pinned on the Civil War era party by southern-sympathizing Democrats—wrote the text of the Fourteenth Amendment at a specific time for a specific reason that speaks directly to our own era. 

When John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Congress was not in session. It had adjourned on the morning of Lincoln’s second inauguration in early March, after beavering away all night to finish up the session’s business, and congressmen had begun their long journeys home where they would stay until the new session began in December. 

Lincoln’s death handed control of the country for more than seven months to his vice president, Andrew Johnson, a former Democrat who wanted to restore the nation to what it had been before the war, minus the institution of slavery that he believed concentrated wealth and power among a small elite. Johnson refused to call Congress back into session while he worked alone to restore the prewar system, dominated by Democrats, as quickly as he could. 

In May, Johnson announced that all former Confederates except for high-ranking political or military officers or anyone worth more than $20,000 (about $400,000 today) would be given amnesty as soon as they took an oath of loyalty to the United States. He pardoned all but about 1,500 of that elite excluded group by December 1865.

Johnson required that southern states change their state constitutions by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting enslavement except as punishment for a crime, nullifying the ordinances of secession, and repudiating the Confederate war debts. Delegates did so, grudgingly and with some wiggling, and then went on to pass the Black Codes, laws designed to keep Black Americans subservient to their white neighbors. 

Under those new state constitutions and racist legal codes, southern states elected new senators and representatives to Congress. Voters put back into national office the very same men who had driven the rebellion, including its vice president, Alexander Stephens, whom the Georgia legislature reelected to the U.S. Senate. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, Johnson cheerily told them he had reconstructed the country without their help.

It looked as if the country was right back to where it had been in 1860, with legal slavery ended but a racial system that looked much like it already reestablished in the South. And since the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole people for the first time, southern congressmen would have more power than before. 

But when the southern state delegations elected under Johnson’s plan arrived in Washington, D.C., to be seated, Republicans turned them away. They rejected the idea that after four years, 600,000 casualties, and more than $5 billion, the country should be ruled by men like Stephens, who insisted that American democracy meant that power resided not in the federal government but in the states, where a small, wealthy minority could insulate itself from the majority rule that controlled Congress. 

In state government a minority could control who could vote and the information to which those voters had access, removing concerns that voters would challenge their wealth or power. White southerners embraced the idea of “popular sovereignty” and “states’ rights,” arguing that any attempt of Congress to enforce majority rule was an attack on democracy.

But President LIncoln and the Republicans reestablished the idea of majority rule, using the federal government to enforce the principle of human equality outlined by the Declaration of Independence. 

And that’s where the Fourteenth Amendment came in. When Johnson tried to restore the former Confederates to power after the Civil War, Americans wrote into the Constitution that anyone born or naturalized in the U.S. was a citizen, and then they established that states must treat all citizens equally before the law, thus taking away the legal basis for the Black Codes and giving the federal government power to enforce equality in the states. They also made sure that anyone who rebels against the federal government can’t make or enforce the nation’s laws. 

Republicans in the 1860s would certainly have believed the Fourteenth Amendment covered Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election. More, though, that amendment sought to establish, once and for all, the supremacy of the federal government over those who wanted to solidify their power in the states, where they could impose the will of a minority. That concept speaks directly to today’s Republicans.

In The Atlantic today, two prominent legal scholars from opposite sides of the political spectrum, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School Laurence H. Tribe, applauded the Baude-Paulsen article and suggested that the American people should support the “faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kp777]

“Heck yeah”: Neal Katyal wants case to boot Trump off ballot

MSNBC Deadline: White House

Nov. 3, 2023

Former Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig invokes former acting U.S. Solicitor General, Neal Katyal to argue a possible 14th Amendment case to bar Donald Trump from running for president at the Supreme Court.

[intelligentchristianlady]

Dire Warning from a Republican

[J. Michael] Luttig, in stark remarks near the close of Thursday’s hearing, warned that Trump and his supporters remain a “clear and present danger to American democracy” because they have so often indicated their desire to try again in 2024 to overturn the presidential election, if they lose.

“I have written that today, almost two years after that fateful day in January of 2021, that still, Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig began.

“That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6. It’s because, to this very day, the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024, where they failed in 2020,” he continued. (x)

[nodynasty4us]

Retired judge J. Michael Luttig spoke slowly and barely managed to do more than restate the committee’s questions. I think the only reason they had him give live testimony is because both Trump’s counsel John Eastman and Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob had both clerked for him.

[arlengrossman]

Conservative Judge Calls Out SCOTUS!

MSNBC: Former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig joins Ali Velshi to discuss his takeaways from this week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on former President Donald Trump’s presidential immunity claim, which many believe will lead to more delays in Trump’s federal criminal cases, and potentially impact the future of the presidency itself. “That this absurd argument is even being made before the…

[garudabluffs]

READ MORE https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-16-2022/comments

[wilwheaton]

Retired conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, who advised Mike Pence on the eve of Jan. 6 that he had no power to play functionary in Trump’s coup, declared this week that the GOP is no longer a political party able to function in a democracy. Trump took and maintains control of the GOP for precisely this reason. He embodies the one principle left in the GOP: Power is only legitimate when it’s wielded by Republicans.

The GOP Is Done with Democracy

[kp777]

By Jamie Gangel, Elizabeth Stuart and Tierney Sneed,

CNN

May 2, 2023

In a carefully worded, but blunt statement, conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig sent a warning shot to the Supreme Court, calling on the Court to enact a code of conduct that would “subject itself to the highest professional and ethical standards that would render the Court beyond reproach.”

If the Supreme Court does not take such action, he cautioned, Congress has “the power under the Constitution” to prescribe ethical standards of conduct for the court.

The statement is part of written testimony Luttig – a former judge on the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals – has submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee holding hearings Tuesday and follows weeks of ethical controversies involving the Supreme Court. Luttig’s public admonition is especially notable because of his conservative credentials and his longstanding, close ties with the Supreme Court.

Read more.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 4, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 5, 2024

Today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states cannot remove Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot. Colorado officials, as well as officials from other states, had challenged Trump’s ability to run for the presidency, noting that the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits those who have engaged in insurrection after taking an oath to support the Constitution from holding office. The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment leaves the question of enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment up to Congress. 

But the court didn’t stop there. It sidestepped the question of whether the events of January 6, 2021, were an insurrection, declining to reverse Colorado’s finding that Trump was an insurrectionist.

In those decisions, the court was unanimous.

But then five of the justices cast themselves off from the other four. Those five went on to “decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy,” as the three dissenting liberal judges put it. The five described what they believed could disqualify from office someone who had participated in an insurrection: a specific type of legislation.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in one concurrence, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in another, note that the majority went beyond what was necessary in this expansion of its decision. “By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson wrote. Seeming to criticize those three of her colleagues as much as the majority, Barrett wrote: “This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency…. [W]ritings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” 

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote that “in the course of unnecessarily deciding all of these questions when they were not even presented by the case, the five-Justice majority effectively decided not only that the former president will never be subject to disqualification, but that no person who ever engages in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States in the future will be disqualified under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, notably did not recuse himself from participating in the case.

There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking. 

For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.

Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[soberscientistlife]

I hope SCOTUS listens but I have my doubts

[arlengrossman]

Former federal judge: Supreme Court ‘dangerously betrayed’ democracy with Trump disqualification decision

By Sarah Fortinsky/ The Hill/ March 14, 2024 Retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig issued a searing rebuke of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision that Colorado could not disqualify former President Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection ban, preserving his ability to seek a second term. In a piece published in The Atlantic on Thursday, Luttig, a longtime conservative…

[corporationsarepeople]

“He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appellate judge and one of the founders of the recently formed Society for the Rule of Law. “And this to him,” Luttig told me, “is the grand finale.”

The 2024 presidential election, in the estimation of Paul Rosenzweig, a senior counsel during the investigation of President Bill Clinton and an assistant deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security in the administration of George W. Bush, isn’t a referendum on Joe Biden. It isn’t even a referendum, he said, on Donald Trump. “This election,” he told me, “is a referendum on the rule of law.”

More unnerving, though, than even that is an idea that has coursed through my conversations over these past several months: That referendum might already be over. Democracy’s on the ballot, many have taken to saying — Biden just said it last week — but democracy, and democratic institutions, as political scientist Brian Klaas put it to me, “can’t function properly if only part of the country believes in them.” And it’s possible that some critical portion of the population does not, or will not, no matter what happens between now and next November, believe in the verdicts or other outcomes rendered by those institutions. What if Trump is convicted? What if he’s not? What if he’s not convicted and then gets elected? What if he is and wins anyway? More disquieting than what might be on the ballot, it turns out, is actually what might not.

“Our democracy rests on a foundation of trust — trust in elections, trust in institutions,” Bassin said. “And you know what scares me the most about Trump? It’s not the sledgehammer he’s taken to the structure of our national house,” he told me. “It’s the termites he’s unleashed into the foundation.”