Modern Cicero speaks
Ryan Lizza and Telos News today published an essay by retired Judge J. Michael Luttig in advance of Constitution Day (9/17). Lizza includes this weighty compliment:
In his defense of the Constitution against what he describes as Trump’s “vicious, unsustainable, and unendurable attack,” Luttig has assumed the role of a republican statesman in the old mold—part Marcus Tullius Cicero, part James Madison.
Whoa.
“These are the times that our Founders feared most for our Republic,” Luttig writes to his email subscribers.
Luttig begins his essay with a bit of constitutional history, but let’s jump right to the heart of it:
On this Constitution Day, September 17, 2025, “We the People” declare these twenty-six grievances against the forty-seventh President of the United States, as the American Colonists declared their twenty-six grievances against King George III on Independence Day, July 4, 1776, almost two hundred and fifty years ago. And as did Abraham Lincoln before us, we beseech that the Constitution once again “become the political religion of the nation.”
He has ruled us as if he were a king who is above the law, when in America there are no kings, the law is king, and no man is above the law.
He has corrupted our democracy and asserted control over our elections in violation of our Constitution.
He has refused to faithfully execute the laws, and he has waged war on our Constitution, our Rule of Law, and our Federal Courts, abridging our constitutional rights, mocking our Constitution and Rule of Law, and attacking our courts. He has defied the orders of our courts, and has harassed, accused, and threatened our judges in order to delegitimize them, intimidate them, and bend them to his will and against our Constitution.
He has corrupted our institutions of law, justice, and law enforcement, making of them instruments for his unfaithful and revengeful execution of the laws against us, not for offenses against the nation, but for perceived personal and political offenses against him.
He has sought absolute power, unchecked and unbalanced by the other branches of our government, by the several states, by the free press, or by us.
He has enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness.
He has arrogated to himself the powers of our Congress and subjugated our Congress to his will so that our representatives are subservient to him and not to us, and Congress has willingly ceded to him its power, which is our power and not its power to cede.
He has commandeered the several states and their officials into his personal service in violation of the sovereign rights reserved to them by the Constitution.
He has proclaimed the free press to be the “enemy of the people” and censored it, and the press has surrendered to him our constitutional right to the free press and abdicated its constitutional responsibility to protect us from him, bribing him in return for his official and political favor and leaving us without the protection of a free press.
He has pronounced us enemies of each other and made of us enemies one of another. He has deliberately divided us from each other, turning us against one another, citizen against citizen, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, parent against child, and child against child.
He has censored and suppressed our speech and silenced our dissent by persecuting and prosecuting us for speaking critically of him and for dissenting from him and his rule, denying us our constitutional rights to speak freely, to associate freely with each other, and to petition our government, for fear of his reprisal.
He has claimed false emergency after false emergency where there has been none, in order to seize powers that are not his — constitutional powers, war powers, foreign policy powers, national security powers, military powers, border security powers, economic powers, taxing powers, trade powers, spending powers, social powers, public health powers, and even judicial powers — and with these wrongly seized powers he has wrought havoc on the nation and on the world.
He has alienated and abandoned our allies and our friends around the globe, and he has befriended and ingratiated himself with our adversaries and our enemies, aligning himself with them instead and upending our foreign policy and diplomatic history. With his withdrawal from our allies and friends, our allies and friends and our adversaries and enemies have conciliated and aligned themselves with each other and disaligned themselves with us.
He has taken military command of our cities and towns on false pretenses, without authority, cause, or justification, over objection of our state and local officials and in violation of our Constitution, dispatching his standing armies to occupy our cities and towns and patrol our streets, intimidating and harassing us, and striking fear in us solely for the purpose of striking fear in us, all for his own egotistic show of might.
He has asserted control over our central banking institutions responsible for our nation’s monetary policy, when the Constitution denies him such control, and he has recompositioned these institutions with loyalists to him, politicizing and roiling the global central banking system and destabilizing our national economy and the economies of the world.
He has eliminated departments and agencies of our government and renamed others without constitutional authority to do so, and he has summarily dismissed large numbers of our public servants without authority, cause, or justification, replacing them with persons loyal and servant to him and not to us.
He has scorned, slandered, and summarily dismissed from government our public servants who have sought to hold him accountable to us and to our Constitution for his grave offenses against our nation, and for unlawful purpose he has summarily dismissed from public service all who would hold him accountable for his present and future offenses against our nation, appointing in their places loyalists to him, so that he is accountable under law to no one.
He has weaponized our government against us, falsely and hypocritically declaring criminals to be heroes, befriending, pardoning, and exalting them, at the same time that he has falsely and hypocritically persecuted and prosecuted our fellow citizens, public servants, and national heroes in personal revenge for their political disagreement with him and for their attempts to hold him accountable to our Constitution for his various offenses.
He has falsely and hypocritically accused our leaders and our public servants of offenses — even treason — against our nation when, unlike him, they have committed no offenses against our nation whatsoever, and he has hypocritically persecuted and threatened to prosecute and imprison our leaders and public servants for their honorable service to us and to our nation.
He has dispatched swarms of his masked and unidentified officers to abduct us from our streets, our workplaces, and our communities without due process of law, and he has cruelly banished and exiled our neighbors and friends to faraway places to be held forever in squalid prisons unfit for human beings.
He has bludgeoned our colleges and universities on pretext and contrary to law, demanding control over their governance, quashing their academic freedom, and cracking down on free speech in our educational institutions and on our campuses.
He has unlawfully extorted our business companies and our legal profession, conscripting them into his personal service, and they have bribed him in return for his approval and for his official and personal patronage. Our companies have betrayed their shareholders, and our law firms their clients and the law, to gain his blessing and secure his official and personal favor.
He has taken dominion over our free enterprise and governmentalized our American capitalism, so that our great business companies are no longer independent of our government, but are dependent on and subject to our government, as in communist and socialist nations.
He has denied and sought to expunge the facts of our nation, our history, our national defense and intelligence, our economy and our justice, our science, our health, and our medicine, and he has summarily dismissed our public officials and national experts who have reported facts to him that he refuses to accept, replacing our public officials and national experts with servants loyal to him and ordering them to report false facts to him that are to his liking.
He has assumed control over the repositories of our history, culture, arts, and national identity and ordered our government to expunge and to rewrite our history, remake our culture, recreate our arts, and redefine our national identity in his image and to his preference.
He has exploited his high public office at home and abroad for emolument and enrichment of himself, his family, and his friends, at our expense and our nation’s expense, in violation of the Constitution.
Lizza continued his intro with this:
Like Cicero, Luttig’s warnings have been precise, legal, insistent that republics die less from the assault than from the neglect, and that respect for the law, once forsaken, rarely returns. As Madison did, Luttig has been reminding Americans that the Constitution is not a set of suggestions, but the frame that bears the weight of the Republic. He has warned not of imminent collapse, but the creeping rot that follows when reverence for law gives way to partisan expediency.
Luttig’s testimony before the January 6 committee in June of 2022 was some of the driest TV I’ve ever watched. “More C-SPAN than ‘Game of Thrones’,” as the L.A. Times put it:
His explanation of the rule of law turned the human frailties on display — corruption, betrayal, the thirst for power — into a law professor’s lecture, and many on social media responded like kids passing notes in a classroom. Even those in attendance in Washington looked bored. But buried in all the careful verbiage there were explosive remarks from the conservative judge: If Pence had succumbed to Trump’s demands, he said, it “would have plunged America into what [he] believed would have been tantamount to a revolution.”
The Trump revolution got a second life after last November when, for God knows what reason, the founders’ heirs elected the multi-felon, liar and lecher to a second term. Since January, Donald Trump and his allies and supporters have worked feverishly not just to dismanltle American democracy, but to burn it down.
Maybe if the January 6 Committee had gotten Brad Pitt to act Luttig’s testimony we wouldn’t be here. But I doubt it. The American spirit Luttig means to resurrect seems determined to remain dead.
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