By admin President Trump and his supporters may have a plan to deny Democrats who win elections in November for the U.S. House their rightful seats when the new Congress convenes in early January, said a conservative former federal judge this week.
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In a speech last week to a near-capacity crowd of 300 at the University of South Carolina Rice School of Law, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig warned that although Trump failed on Jan. 6 2021 to overturn a presidential election, he might not fail this time.
“Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since Jan. 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and America with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy and elections,” Luttig said.
“All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections,” Luttig said.
“His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress,” Luttig said.
A spokeswoman for the White House, asked for comment, said, “No one has any idea who this retired judge is. He has no insight into the President’s thinking, conversations, or future plans.”
Johnson’s office has not yet replied to a query by The State newspaper on Luttig’s remarks.
According to polls, Democrats are favored to pick up seats in the 435-member House of Representatives and perhaps capture a majority. The majority party in the House has broad power to set committee agendas and launch investigations. Currently, the House has 218 Republicans, 214 Democrats and one independent.
Luttig, 72, a former judge on the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals from 1991 to 2006, has a reputation of being a staunch conservative and an outspoken defender of American’s government under the rule of law. He clerked for Antonin Scalia, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice when Scalia was a federal judge. Luttig has 47,000 subscribers to his Substack platform.
Luttig also worked in the Reagan White House and in the Department of under President George Herbert Walker Bush. He went to Washington and Lee University and the University of Virginia School of Law. Luttig also was general counsel for Boeing from 2006 to 2020 and played a major role in bringing that company’s manufacturing facilities to South Carolina.
For several weeks, Luttig has appeared on national news shows such as MS NBC to warn of a possible ”Trump-inspired coup attempt” in the U.S. House in January. He also wrote an article in the New Republic expanding on his theory. This was the first time he has appeared in South Carolina in person to issue his warnings.
“America’s time of testing has come,” Luttig told the crowd.
In his speech, laced with references to America’s founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln, Luttig predicted that Trump “will try every unlawful means over the next five weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.
“America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and warn Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats … would be dead on arrival January 3,” Luttig said.
Luttig also reminded the crowd that when Trump tried on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn former President Joe Biden’s election in the electoral vote certification, then-Vice President Pence saved the Republic by refusing “to be party to the gravest constitutional offense a president can commit – the refusal to relinquish and peacefully transfer the power of the presidency to his duly-elected successor.”
The Founding Fathers warned of a “wannabe king” like Trump, Luttig said, a man who has “declared war on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the nation’s Federal Judiciary. And for 21 months now, he has prosecuted that war with the same vengeance that he has prosecuted his war on America’s Democracy.
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The founders believed that were such a demagogue ever to come into power in America, he would, having once been elected “and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, pretend false votes, foul play, and hold possession of the reins of government,” said Luttig, quoting Thomas Jefferson.
Luttig got a resounding ovation. One person in the audience, I.S. Leevy Johnson, an attorney, later told a reporter, “I thought it was a very courageous speech. He hit the nail on the head by disclosing what is a threat to all the citizens of America.”
Why Luttig spoke
Luttig was the first speaker in what will be a series of annual lectures endowed by James E. Bowers, 79, who was born in poverty in Orangeburg County and rose to hold legal positions at the highest levels of the American legal system. The lectures are on the topics of democracy and the rule of law.
Bowers, the first African American professor at the University of South Carolina law school, got his undergraduate degree at the University of South Carolina and his law degree from Harvard Law School.
In a brief speech before Luttig took the floor, Bowers told the audience that he endowed the lecture series because he felt “we the people have been taking our cherished rights and tradition for granted.”
Today, Bowers said, many Americans don’t understand our government’s system of checks and balances and constitutional protections among the three co-equal branches “and they don’t vote…. And many who do vote are misinformed,” Bowers said.
“It is my hope that this lecture series will be publicized broadly and open to all students and all members of the Columbia community and beyond,” Bowers said.
Luttig was his first choice to speak, Bowers said. “It is my desire to have speakers who present a thoughtful and balanced view on the status of our democracy and suggest practical solutions to improve it… The people of the United States have a common interest in preserving our Constitution.”
Bowers has taught at Boston University School of Law, the University of Connecticut School of Law and Yale University School of Law. He was also longtime general counsel for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and worked at the Law and Compliance Department at Aetna Inc.
Law school dean speaks
Law school dean William Hubbard told the crowd that the rule of law is a “durable system of laws, institutions, norms and community commitments. It’s not all just about laws.”
Core values of the rule of law are accountability and clear and fair laws, Hubbard said. “Nazi Germany had lots of laws, but they weren’t just laws,” he said. “That was rule by law — not rule of law.”
Other values of a rule of law society are openness and having justice delivered in a timely manner by independent judges, Hubbard said.
Also, in our society, no one is above the law, Hubbard said. “If you have a person above the law, you have law by ruler, not rule of law.
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