A former federal judge once lauded by the right for his conservative legal opinions delivered a scathing rebuke of the Republican Party over its continued fealty to Donald Trump.
J. Michael Luttig wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the GOP’s “spineless support” has enabled the former president despite his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and his indictment in the classified documents scandal.
“Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024,” he wrote.
He called Trump’s arguments that he has the right to hold onto any documents he wants “preposterous,” and called out the party for being ready to hand him the nomination all over again.
“Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country,” he wrote, adding that the campaign is essentially one running against the U.S. Constitution.
“If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved.”
He warned that Trump’s campaign is doomed to fail given the large number of Americans who would never vote for him “if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law.”
Politico has said that Luttig ― who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 ― “operated behind the scenes at the top of the conservative legal world.”
He advised then-Vice President Mike Pence not to cave to Trump’s pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 election ― advice Pence ultimately heeded.