Former federal judge: Supreme Court ‘dangerously betrayed’ democracy with Trump disqualification decision
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, which preserved his ability to seek a second term.
In a piece published Thursday in The Atlantic, 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.”
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Former federal judge: Supreme Court "dangerously betrayed" democracy with Trump disqualification decision https://t.co/JozNWP9B9e
— The Hill (@thehill) March 15, 2024
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