This is the second part of a definitive article on the current state of the “Rule of Law” in the United States written by one of the country’s top jurists, J. Michael Luttig. It is a little too long for one blog, so I am publishing it in four installments. That serves two purposes: The first is that it makes each installment more palatable in size and the second is that publishing it in several parts will have more impact on all of us.
“Only hours after Dugan’s arrest, the public learned that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old American and the child’s mother and sister to Honduras, as the child’s father frantically tried to stop the unlawful deportation. The detention and deportation of the child “is without any basis in law and violates her fundamental due process rights,” a petition filed on her behalf said. Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by Trump, ruled that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, and set a hearing for May 16 because of his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
The rule-of-law casualties of these presidentially provoked national crises are mounting by the day. America cannot withstand three-and-a-half more years of this president if his first few months are a harbinger of what lies ahead.
TRUMP HAS SPOILED FOR THIS WAR AGAINST THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY, THE CONSTITUTION, AND THE RULE OF LAW SINCE JANUARY 6, 2021. (My caps and Luttig’s words)
He has repeatedly vowed to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he falsely maintains was the partisan “weaponization” of the federal government against him. No one other than Trump and his most sycophantic supporters believes that the government’s attempts to hold him and others accountable for their actions that day amount to “weaponization.” With the world as witness, Trump attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power—committing perhaps the gravest constitutional crime that a president could ever commit. The United States had no choice but to prosecute him for those crimes, lest he be allowed to make a mockery of the Constitution of the United States.
IT IS TRUMP WHO IS ACTUALLY WEAPONIZING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGAINST BOTH HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES AND COUNTLESS OTHER AMERICAN CITIZENS TODAY. (My caps and Luttig’s words)
Consider his attempts to ruin Chris Krebs, the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency chief who in November 2020 refused to endorse the president’s lies that the election had been rigged against him. Trump has now directed the Department of Justice to investigate Krebs—for what, who knows?
Trump is supremely confident, though deludedly so, that he can win this war against the judiciary and the rule of law, just as he was deludedly confident that he could win the war he instigated against America’s democracy after the 2020 election.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, REFERENCING KING GEORGE III OF BRITAIN, READS, “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.” (My caps and Luttig’s words)
Order after order issued by this tyrannical president has been blatantly unconstitutional or otherwise illegal. Trump has provoked a global economic crisis with his usurious tariffs, for which he does not have authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States, and he has provoked a constitutional crisis with his defiance of a direct order from the Supreme Court – to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to America – and orders from other lower federal courts that he is bound by the Constitution to follow and enforce. He has viciously attacked judges, putting their safety and that of their families at risk, and he has already called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him and his administration, drawing rebuke from the chief justice of the United States (Trump’s sidekick, Elon Musk, has called for the impeachment of many more).
Tying the nation’s judiciary up in Gordian knots, Trump has gleefully stymied the federal courts with the sheer volume of his unlawful actions. To date, more than 200 legal challenges have been filed against the administration since he returned to the White House, most of which have already been preliminarily, if not finally, successful. As Trump continues to ravage and usurp the constitutional powers of the Congress of the United States, his adoring Republican Congress has predictably been conspicuously absent.
ONLY THE SUPREME COURT IS LEFT NOW TO REIN IN THIS PRESIDENT’S LAWLESSNESS, AND ALTHOUGH THE COURT IS MAKING SOME LIMITED EFFORTS IN THAT DIRECTION, IT IS ALREADY APPARENT THAT NOT EVEN THAT INSTITUTION CAN STOP DONALD TRUMP. HE WILL IGNORE EVEN THE SUPREME COURT WHENEVER HE WANTS. (My caps and Luttig’s words)
As Trump turns the federal government of the United States against Americans and America itself, the bill of particulars against him is already longer than the Declaration of Independence’s bill of particulars against King George III and the British empire. For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims. Not for the crippling global tariffs he ordered unilaterally; not for his unlawful deportations of hundreds of immigrants to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), El Salvador’s squalid maximum-security prison; not for his deportation of U.S. citizens to Honduras; not for his defiantly corrupt order from the Great Hall of the Department of Justice to weaponize the department against his political enemies; not for his evil executive orders against the nation’s law firms for their representation of his political enemies and clients of whom he personally disapproves; not for his corrupt executive orders against honorable American citizens and former officials of his own administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security chief of staff who dared to criticize Trump anonymously during his first term; not for his unlawful bludgeoning of the nation’s colleges and universities with unconstitutional demands that they surrender their governance and curricula to his wholly owned federal government; not for his threatened revocation of Harvard University’s tax-exempt status; not for his impoundment of billions of dollars of congressionally approved funds or his politically motivated threats to revoke tax exemptions; not for his attempt to alter the rules for federal elections; not for his direct assault on the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship guarantee; not for his mass firings of federal employees; not for his empowerment of Musk and DOGE to ravage the federal government; not for his threats to fire Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell; not for his unconstitutional attacks on press freedoms; and finally, not for his appalling arrest of Judge Dugan.”
As I said in the first part of this series, I have tried to break this article at appropriate points in the interest of the two functions I described at the beginning. That means the whole article will be presented in four (4) parts. I hope you will read, re-read, and perhaps save all of them. I think they are an invaluable resource for the future of the country… or, at least, a fitting epitaph. I will finish this blog, as I will with succeeding chapter, with the last two sentences of Luttig’s article.
“After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
From across the ages, Frederick Douglass is crying out that we Americans never forget: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
