Here’s a gift link to a searing essay by Judge Michael J. Luttig. I never appreciated his judicial philosophy but I do appreciate the fact that he is clear-eyed about what we are facing and willing to be a patriot instead of a toady. It’s just shocking that it’s so rare these days. I thought there’d be more of these guys. My bad for still having naivete toward conservatives.
A short excerpt:
From the moment he entered the White House on January 20, 2025, Trump has waged war against the rule of law. He not only instigated a worldwide economic crisis with his hotheaded, unlawful tariffs leveled against our global trading partners and our enemies alike; he deliberately provoked a constitutional crisis with his frontal assault on the federal judiciary, the third and co-equal branch of government and guardian of the rule of law—grabbing more and more power for nothing but power’s sake.
On his first day back, foreshadowing his all-out assault on the rule of law, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,200 January 6 rioters. Soon, he began to persecute his political enemies—of whom there are now countless numbers—and to fire the prosecutors for the United States who attempted to hold him accountable for the grave crimes against the Constitution that he committed after losing the 2020 election.
Also within those first 100 days, the FBI arrested the Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan in her Milwaukee courthouse on federal criminal charges that she was “obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” because she invited an undocumented immigrant appearing before her on misdemeanor charges to exit her courtroom by way of the jury door rather than the front door of the courtroom. The evidence, at least as revealed so far, does not come close to supporting these charges.
The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins. The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.
Appearing on Fox News, the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, defended the evidently unlawful arrest: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. The judges “are deranged, is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today if you are harboring a fugitive … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”
No, Ms. Bondi, our judges do not think they are above the law, and no, judges are not deranged. They are simply upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—the same oath you took.
That’s just a small bit of the bill of indictment. He goes into great detail about the assault on law firms and universities, the Chris Krebs-Miles Taylor vendetta, tariffs, DOGE, the Alien Enemies Act and more. It’s a sobering compendium of Trump’s assaults on our system.
Luttig concludes:
Donald Trump may wish he could dictate his unconscionable global tariffs; dispense with due process and deport whomever he pleases, citizen and not; and vanish away huge swaths of the federal government without check or rebuke. He may wish he did not have to contend with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the free press, or the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He may wish he could ignore the Constitution’s elections clauses and run America’s elections from the White House. And he may wish he could intimidate the nation’s lawyers and law firms from challenging his abuse of power and commandeer them to do his personal bidding.
But it is these constitutional obstacles to a tyrannical president that have made America the greatest nation on Earth for almost 250 years, not the fallen America that Trump delusionally thinks he’s going to make great again tomorrow.
After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
From across the ages, Frederick Douglass is crying out that we Americans never forget: “The limits of tyrants are precribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
I suspect Luttig wrote this to his fellow conservative judges serving on the Appeals Courts and the Supreme Court. I’m not sure appeals to their consciences or to the rule of law are effective anymore. (I’ve been reading Leah Litman’s new book Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes and I’m not sanguine.) But it’s worth a try.