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 jurist on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said all nine justices “dangerously betrayed” democracy in making their decision.
Voters and advocacy groups had filed dozens of challenges to Trump’s ballot eligibility in states across the country, claiming his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack triggered his disqualification.
The high court sided with Trump by ruling Congress has exclusive authority to enforce the 14th Amendment to disqualify federal candidates.
Luttig, who had been vocal in support of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to bar Trump from the ballot, described Section 3 of the 14th Amendment as the Constitution’s “safety net for America’s democracy, promising to automatically disqualify from public office all oath-breaking insurrectionists against the Constitution, deeming them too dangerous to entrust with power unless supermajorities of both houses of Congress formally remove their disability.”
“Our highest court dramatically and dangerously betrayed its obligation to enforce what once was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy. The Supreme Court has now rendered that safety net a dead letter, effectively rescinding it as if it had never been enacted,” Luttig wrote.
Luttig pushed back on the argument that barring Trump from the ballot would be undemocratic, writing, “Disqualification is not what is antidemocratic; rather, it is the insurrection that is antidemocratic, as the Constitution emphatically tells us.”
He continued, “That the disqualification clause has not previously been invoked to keep traitors against the Constitution from having a second opportunity to fracture the framework of our republic reflects not its declining relevance but its success at deterring the most dangerous assaults on our government until now.”
Luttig, who previously submitted an amicus brief in the case, reiterated his core arguments in favor of upholding the Colorado decision.
“What ought to have been, as a matter of the Constitution’s design and purpose, the climax of the struggle for the survival of America’s democracy and the rule of law instead turned out to be its nadir, delivered by a Court unwilling to perform its duty to interpret the Constitution as written,” Luttig wrote.
“Desperate to assuage the growing sense that it is but a political instrument, the Court instead cemented that image into history. It did so at what could be the most perilous constitutional and political moment in our country’s history, when the nation and the Constitution needed the Court most—to adjudicate not the politics of law, but the law of the politics that is poisoning the lifeblood of America.”
thebigpicturereport ™ 
Dear Arlen:
Your comment from a known Staunchly Conservative Judge, Michael Luttig touches a nerve ending like a hot poker.
It seems almost ironic that a conservative judge in this particular time period of American History should not only set aside all politics to side with our Constitution and MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE LAW OF OUR LAND!
We have come to expect conservative judges as always opting for siding with anything politically to the Right (entrepreneurial) side of Politics.
Judge Luttig stated his position in hard, cold, black and white terms:
that all decisions made about the issues revolving around Trump MUST BE made IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAW and NOT to serve POLITICS in any way!
This rings my chimes like the giant bell of Big Ben.
Below is the contrasting blatant example of the average American’s insane romantic love of the structures of so many Western Movies.
Has NOT EVERY GODDAMN thing that Trump has ever said and done in the public eye
reeked of the stereotypical villain of “The Quick and the Dead” (John Herod played by Gene Hackman)?????
Every time Hackman’s Herod or any other Super Villain says to ALL
(every last stinking pussy cowards in the town)
the phrase used in a million Westerns:
“I AM THE LAW”
Is that not the mantra of the lone EGO demanding to be a God in his own universe?
Has Trump ever said or done anything that doesn’t loudly proclaim the following???:
that he is “SPECIAL”,
that he is “EXCEPTIONAL”,
that he is ALWAYS ABOVE the LAW,
That he OWNS ALL AMERICANS
because they are all PUSSYS
and NO ONE IS ABLE TO MEET HIM ONE ON ONE IN HIS VERSION OF A WESTERN GUN FIGHT!
The romantic addiction to the Western Drama that too many people harbor down in their unconscious that hungers (more than life itself) the overcoming of the bad guy in a final quick ending is far more dangerous and insidious than the average American is ever willing to face within themselves.
That FATAL FLAW is every individual turning their back on the fact that the system of ONE POWERFUL MAN against the WHOLE NATION (or Western Town) never really changes things from one ultimate power to the next one that will follow.
That is the problem with desiring ONE HERO to replace ONE VILLAIN and still leaving a whole city full of pussies and cowards and irresponsible people who want all the breakers of laws to only hurt other pussies and cowards.
Those Stereotypical Westerns always leave all the townsfolk primed for the next bully outlaw and pretender to the throne of Sheriff.
What a shame we don’t specialize on movies that do NOT seek to idolize a single hero…
What would be wrong with teaching our young that they stand to build a better society if they make their future winners out of cooperatives and partnerships and negotiations of the play of give and take?????
What is it in some people that makes them fantasize or wish at becoming kings of all that they could see and disdain and reject the sharing of the benefits of working together and getting along?
YT/RET
Rule of law. No person is above the rule of law. I do believe I remember these concepts from history books. How far we’ve fallen. You are right. We need to bring them back.