Conservative Legal Icon Has Harsh Words For Supreme Court’s Trump Ballot Ruling

Conservative former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling permitting Donald Trump to stay on 2024 ballots, calling components of the choice “stunning in its overreach.”

On CNN Monday, Luttig stated the ruling was “both astonishing and unprecedented, not for its decision of the exceedingly narrow question presented by the case — though that issue was important — but rather for its decision to reach and decide a myriad of the other constitutional issues surrounding disqualification under 14th Amendment.”

Luttig, a former veteran conservative jurist on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was amongst quite a lot of distinguished authorized minds to start publicly arguing final yr that Trump was ineligible to carry workplace once more beneath the so-called revolt clause of the Constitution — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

He filed an amicus transient with the Supreme Court in January, arguing his level.

The Supreme Court dominated unanimously Monday that states don’t have the authority to bar the previous president from showing on ballots, overturning a Colorado court docket’s resolution to take action.

The Supreme Court additionally dominated that solely Congress has the authority to disqualify federal candidates beneath Section 3. The three liberal justices and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett disagreed with that call.

In a concurrence, the liberal justices stated they protested the “majority’s effort to use this case to define the limits of federal enforcement of that provision.”

Barrett, in her personal concurrence, wrote that the case didn’t require the court docket to resolve the “complicated question” of whether or not federal laws is the one enforcement mechanism for Section 3.

According to Luttig, in deciding these questions unnecessarily, the bulk “effectively decided that the former president will never be disqualified from holding the presidency in 2024 or ever for that matter.”

He added, “But even more importantly, as the concurrence said, effectively, the court today decided that no person in the future will ever be disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, regardless of whether he or she has engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States.”

Listen to his evaluation beneath on CNN’s “The Lead.”