A retired federal judge said in a recent interview that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from serving in the White House again. Former Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig also stated that Trump was a hazard to the future of the United States.
Luttig told MSNBC that Trump could not legally serve due to an aspect of the 14th Amendment’s third section. According to the retired judge, Trump would not have to be convicted of “insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States.”
He called the situation a “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.”
The attempt to bar Trump under the 14th Amendment explained https://t.co/jjHBC9mvvD
— FOX 5 San Diego (@fox5sandiego) November 3, 2023
“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,” the judge said.
“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.”
Furthermore, the judge said that Trump and those around him represented a threat to the American political system after the Jan. 6, 2021 protests. Luttig argued that Trump and his allies later became an “even graver danger” to the country’s democracy.
He currently called him a “clear and present danger, an imminent danger to American democracy.”
The former judge’s comments come came as there are currently two different court cases challenging Trump’s ability to legally serve in the White House.
The cases in Colorado and Minnesota argue that Trump is disqualified due to the same clause in the 14th Amendment cited by Luttig.
An attorney representing the former president said that the Colorado lawsuit was “anti-democratic.”
Trump’s legal team filed a motion to have the judge in the case recuse herself due to her political donation record, which the judge denied.
