[ Judge J. Michael Luttig, appointed as a Federal Judge by
President George H. W. Bush, testified to the House Committee last
Thursday. The same day in Texas, the state GOP convention rejected the
election results, declaring Biden not the president.]
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TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY – AFTER HEARING EVIDENCE OF TRUMP’S
COUP PLOT  
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Heather Cox Richardson
June 18, 2022
Letters from an American
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_ Judge J. Michael Luttig, appointed as a Federal Judge by President
George H. W. Bush, testified to the House Committee last Thursday. The
same day in Texas, the state GOP convention rejected the election
results, declaring Biden not the president. _

Attendees at the 2022 Republican Party of Texas State Convention in
Houston, Texas, June 16, 2022., Lola Gomez / Dallas Morning News

 

Of all we have heard at the hearings of the House Select Committee to
Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge J.
Michael Luttig’s testimony on Thursday stands out. Luttig is a
leading conservative thinker, a giant in Republican legal circles, who
worked in the Reagan administration, was appointed by President George
H. W. Bush to a federal judgeship, and was on the short-list for a
Supreme Court seat during President George W. Bush’s term. In
January 2021, then–vice president Mike Pence’s staff turned to him
for support to make sure Pence didn’t agree to count out electors;
Luttig opposed the scheme absolutely.

Luttig’s words carry weight among Republican lawmakers.

On Thursday, Judge Luttig examined the ongoing danger to democracy and
located it not just on former president Donald Trump and his enablers,
but on the entire Republican Party of today, the party that embraces
the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, the party that continues
to plan to overturn any election in which voters choose a Democrat.

“[T]he former president and his party are today a clear and present
danger for American democracy,” Luttig reiterated
to _NPR’s_ _All Things Considered_.

And, as if in confirmation, delegates to a convention of the Texas
Republican Party today approved platform planks rejecting “the
certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and [holding]
that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately
elected by the people of the United States”; requiring students
“to learn about the dignity of the preborn human,” including that
life begins at fertilization; treating homosexuality as “an abnormal
lifestyle choice”; locking the number of Supreme Court justices at
9; getting rid of the constitutional power to levy income taxes;
abolishing the Federal Reserve; rejecting the Equal Rights Amendment;
returning Christianity to schools and government; ending all gun
safety measures; abolishing the Department of Education; arming
teachers; requiring colleges to teach “free-market liberty
principles”; defending capital punishment; dictating the ways in
which the events at the Alamo are remembered; protecting Confederate
monuments; ending gay marriage; withdrawing from the United Nations
and the World Health Organization; and calling for a vote “for the
people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should
reassert its status as an independent nation.”

Luttig said that Republicans must start speaking to Democrats as
”fellow Americans that have a shared destiny and shared hopes and
dreams for America.” “We cannot have in America either political
party behaving itself like the Republican Party has since the 2020
election.”

I’ve been thinking a lot since Thursday of Luttig’s clear-eyed
view of the dangers we face in this country today, and of his
willingness to cast aside old political loyalties to call them out in
order to protect our democracy. They remind me of nothing so much as
Abraham Lincoln’s description of the way northerners reacted to the
1854 passage of a law permitting the spread of enslavement into
western lands from which it had previously been excluded. The passage
of that law woke up Americans who had not been paying attention, and
convinced them to work across old political lines to stop oligarchs
from destroying democracy. Northerners were “thunderstruck and
stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each
fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a
pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver” to push back
against the oligarchic enslavers, Lincoln later said. Regardless of
where they started politically, they stood up for democracy together.
And while they came from different parties, he said, they were
“still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and
prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Over the course of the next decade, that new coalition argued and
struggled and took the nation in an entirely new direction. It fought
and won a war that involved more than two million men and cost more
than $5 billion, established our first national money, welcomed
immigrants, created public colleges, invented the income tax, gave
farmers land, built transcontinental railroads, and—finally—ended
human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for a crime for
which a person had been duly convicted.

And, of course, it saved the nation from those seeking to destroy it.

“[T]o my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of
politics,” Luttig told _NPR_ about his extraordinary statements.
In a later note he added: “I wanted to do this for America and I
understood I had an obligation to do it for America. It was my
‘moment’ in my life to stand up, step forward, and bear witness to
what I believe and what I do not believe.”

—

Notes:

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* JMLuttig to HCR, June 17, 2022.
* Abraham Lincoln, Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854
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_[Professor HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate
and the graduate level. Her early work focused on the transformation
of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore
Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion,
and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her
history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014) examines
the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the
Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an
intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of
the Reconstruction Era.]_

* GOP
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