Retired Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig said Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that the U.S. Constitution disqualified former President Donald Trump from holding the office of the presidency who he called an “imminent danger.”
Luttig said, “It is not necessary in order for the former president to be disqualified or for any other person who comes within the ambient of Section 3 to be disqualified, that he or she have been convicted of an insurrection or rebellion. Nor is it necessary that the Congress of the United States have found that the former president or any other person have engaged in an insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States. That’s what we call in constitutional law the self-executing character, if you will, of Section 3. It does not require a congressional finding and it does not require criminal conviction. Those are matters that are completely separate from the eligibility for disqualification under Section 3.”
He continued, “The American people through the framers of the Constitution, both the original Constitution, but also the 14th Amendment which was ratified in 1868, those people were our representatives, if you will, the American people’s representatives. It’s they who determined in Section 3 that an individual who’s engaged in an insurrection or rebellion having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and thereafter engaged in an insurrectional rebellion against the Constitution of the United States should be disqualified from holding high public office thereafter.”
Luttig added, “The former president and his allies were a clear and present danger to American democracy. A year later I was asked by Michael Schmidt of the New York Times and I said one year after January 6 that the former president and his allies were an even graver danger to American democracy than they were a year prior. Most recently I’ve said now, two and a half years since that the former president is a clear and present danger an imminent danger to American democracy.”
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