The conservative Luttig, a former U.S. Court of Appeals judge, and two fellow conservative lawyers, George Conway and former Rep. Barbara Comstock penned a guest essay in The New York Times lashing out at both Donald Trump and those who enable him. Calling Trump’s reported plans for a second term in office “frightening,” Luttig, et al. argued the need for “an organization of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon” to “step up, speak out and defend” them.
The authors took quite a few swipes at The Federal Society. After lauding its “principled role” in responding to “left-liberal domination of the courts,” they criticized its failure to confront and combat Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his continued denial that he lost. “When White House lawyers are inventing cockamamie theories to stop the peaceful transition of power and copping pleas to avoid jail time, it’s clear that we in the legal profession have come to a crisis point,” they wrote.
Luttig discussed the matter with MSNBC’s Katie Phang Saturday morning. She asked Luttig how to stop those he called “the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men” to “stop doing Trump’s dirty work?”
The former judge did not mince words as he explained how much damage Trump has done to our institutions of law and democracy. “The prohibitively high cost to the nation at this point, though, is that over the past three years, if not longer, the former president has normalized his behavior and his delegitimizing and dehumanizing rhetoric into our political culture," Luttig said.
In response to Phang’s question, Luttig said he and his colleagues believe that lawyers are “uniquely positioned and uniquely obligated to support and defend American democracy and the rule of law at this particular moment in our history. These are the causes of our times.”
Left unsaid is that he thinks conservative lawyers are uniquely positioned and obligated to take on the MAGA wing of their movement.
I so hope there are plenty of others who will join him.
