Care to guess why the fascist-in-exile hasn’t sought to smear the retired federal judge who tore him apart at yesterday’s Jan. 6 hearing?
Seriously, hasn’t it long been his standard practice to dismiss with extreme demagoguery anyone who dares question his stable genius? Why give a pass to a gentleman named J. Michael Luttig? It seems out of character for Trump to tread so lightly when someone says something like this:
“Irrespective of the merits of the legal arguments that fueled the former president’s efforts to overturn that election – irrespective of them, though there were none – those arguments, and therefore those efforts, by the former president were the product of the most reckless, insidious, and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history.”
And this:
If Mike Pence had obeyed Trump’s command to stop counting the electoral votes, “it would’ve plunged America into what I believe would’ve been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis…the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.”
And this:
“I would’ve laid my body across the road” before he would’ve advised Pence to obey Trump.
And this:
“The former president’s accountability under the law for the riot on the United States Capitol on January 6 is incidental to his responsibility and accountability for his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American people and thereby steal America’s democracy from America herself.”
And, perhaps most importantly, this:
“The former president and his allies are executing a blueprint for 2024, in open and plain view of the American public…Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. 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 he) were to lose that election, they would attempt to overturn (it) in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election. I don’t speak those words lightly. I would’ve never spoken those words ever in my life – except that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us.”
Wow! Those gotta be fightin’ words, right? Lest we forget, Trump even rebuked Ivanka the other day – he said she was “checked out” – after she agreed with Bill Barr that daddy was lying about election fraud. But the MAGA king and his minions seem oddly muted in the wake of Luttig’s searing broadsides (especially those in his written statement). What gives?
It’s simple, actually. Luttig is unassailable:
He’s a Texas-born lifelong Republican. He clerked for conservative icon Antonin Scalia when the latter was a federal appeals court judge. He worked in Ronald Reagan’s White House. He was a Republican- appointed assistant U.S. attorney general. He helped prepare Clarence Thomas for his 1991 confirmation hearings. He was a Republican-appointed federal appeals court judge; one of his clerks was John Eastman – the whack job lawyer who mapped Trump’s illegal coup attempt.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Luttig was so conservative that he mentored Ted Cruz.
See, this is the genius of the Jan. 6 Committee: The most damaging blows against Trump are meted out by conservative Republicans. Luttig’s testimony was not particularly flashy – certainly it was no match for the sane Trump lawyer who said to Eastman, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”; or the beleaguered Trump aide who heard the boss call Pence “a pussy”; or the Pence aide who told Eastman on Jan. 6 that “thanks to your bullshit we’re now under siege” – but the judge’s words were never more weighty than in his written statement, where he challenged his fellow Republicans to start acting like Americans again:
“A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on Jan. 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge…Jan. 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date. In fact, Jan. 6 was a separate war unto itself, a war for America’s democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters. Both wars are raging to this day…
“In order to end these wars that are draining the lifeblood from our country, a critical mass of our two parties’ political leaders is needed…The logic for reconciliation of these wars being waged in America today dictates that this number needs to include a critical mass of leaders from the former president’s political party and that those leaders need to go first.”
But wait a sec. What leaders?
Alas, even Luttig’s wisdom had its limits.