This post by Heather Cox Richardson on Luttig’s testimony is excellent:
On Thursday, Judge Luttig examined the ongoing danger to democracy and located it not just on former president Donald Trump and his enablers, but on the entire Republican Party of today, the party that embraces the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, the party that continues to plan to overturn any election in which voters choose a Democrat.
“[T]he former president and his party are today a clear and present danger for American democracy,” Luttig reiterated to NPR’s All Things Considered.
I’ve been thinking a lot since Thursday of Luttig’s clear-eyed view of the dangers we face in this country today, and of his willingness to cast aside old political loyalties to call them out in order to protect our democracy. They remind me of nothing so much as Abraham Lincoln’s description of the way northerners reacted to the 1854 passage of a law permitting the spread of enslavement into western lands from which it had previously been excluded. The passage of that law woke up Americans who had not been paying attention, and convinced them to work across old political lines to stop oligarchs from destroying democracy. Northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver” to push back against the oligarchic enslavers, Lincoln later said. Regardless of where they started politically, they stood up for democracy together. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Over the course of the next decade, that new coalition argued and struggled and took the nation in an entirely new direction. It fought and won a war that involved more than two million men and cost more than $5 billion, established our first national money, welcomed immigrants, created public colleges, invented the income tax, gave farmers land, built transcontinental railroads, and—finally—ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for a crime for which a person had been duly convicted.
And, of course, it saved the nation from those seeking to destroy it.
“[T]o my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of politics,” Luttig told NPR about his extraordinary statements. In a later note he added: “I wanted to do this for America and I understood I had an obligation to do it for America. It was my ‘moment’ in my life to stand up, step forward, and bear witness to what I believe and what I do not believe.”
Here are highlights of Luttig’s interview on NPR:
Do you think that there is a meaningful constituency within your party, the Republican Party that is, willing to have good-faith conversations about this? And if so where are they?
As of the day that I testified, no, there are none, and there haven’t been for these couple of years. I’m not a politician, I don’t do politics, but that’s what I propose happen. And it’s with my fervent hope that some number of our elected leaders, at least, will hear the words that I spoke on Thursday and understand what I said, which is that they have an obligation, a high obligation, that they undertake by oath to act in the interest of America and Americans in contrast to their own personal political interests.
If you look at the most recent primaries, pro-Trump candidates are still competing across the country and winning on the lie that there was election fraud in 2020. How do you build trust in our democracy, in the idea that we can get to a better place in our country when you have people at these important high levels who are denying the 2020 election results?
You don’t and you can’t, and that’s why I testified Thursday that the former president and his party are today a clear and present danger for American democracy. And I specifically contrasted that with the circumstance, had it been so, that the former president and the Republican Party had stood down after the 2020 election and accepted the results. But as I said to the select committee on Thursday, that’s not what’s happened.
To this day, the former president and the Republican Party have insisted — and they persist in the claim — that the 2020 election was stolen, and not merely that, but they pledge to execute the same blueprint in 2024 that they attempted in 2020. But their every intention is if they do execute on that plan in 2024 that they will win in 2024 where they failed in 2020.
The January 6th hearings are clearly important for the country to understand what happened on that day and why it happened, and I know you feel that way, but many Republicans do not. They call the hearings an effort to divide. And so I wonder whether you think that they’re more likely to bring closure or further fuel this division that you say is destroying our democracy?
Well, when I turned in my statement to discussing the two political parties in the United States, the most important words to me … were that the two political parties in America are the political guardians of our democracy. That’s why I went on to say that it’s imperative that both parties end this one war for democracy and suggesting that it was the obligation of the Republican Party to begin that reconciliation.
We cannot have in America either political party behaving itself like the Republican Party has since the 2020 election. As long as that continues then we will have an unstable democratic order in the United States, and we will forever be fighting over American democracy. As I went on to say in my statement, the war for America’s democracy is not a war that America can win.
If the two political parties are going to be fighting literally over America’s democracy, that is a war that is endless, and it is destructive of the United States of America. And there is not a person in this country who can disagree with that. They can argue over you know whether, as the Republicans have continued to do, the 2020 activities of the former president in the party threatened democracy. They’re silly to even suggest that. But they cannot argue over the abstract point, the conceptual point that I made, which is if the two parties cannot agree to the orderly transfer of power in the United States then that war will continue, and as long as it continues we do not have democracy in the United States.
Do you think that the January 6th hearings that are going on right now might actually sort of break through and encourage politicians to maybe start to stand up on this issue?
Well, you know I’m a former judge and a lawyer, and to my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of politics. So count me as cynical as to politics and all politicians. Do I think that maybe these hearings can break through to some American patriots who are currently our political leaders? I hope with all my heart and soul that the hearings will break through to those political leaders.
You can listen to the whole thing here: