Judge Luttig: “Trump vs. the Courts”
Board Member and former Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig authored an op-ed in The New York Times, “It’s Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won’t End Well for Trump.” He writes:
President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago …
If Mr. Trump continues to attempt to usurp the authority of the courts, the battle will be joined, and it will be up to the Supreme Court, Congress and the American people to step forward and say: Enough. As the Declaration of Independence said, referring to King George III of Britain, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Mr. Trump appears to have forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War to secure their independence from the British monarchy and establish a government of laws, not of men, so that Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” in 1776, “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”