Michael Luttig, one of the most celebrated legal minds of his generation, was wrested out of quiet semiretirement for one mission: vanquishing Donald Trump — and thus, in Luttig's mind, saving American democracy.
Late one night in the spring of 1994, a 40-year-old federal judge was startled awake by loud pounding at the front door of his home in Vienna, Va.
Theirs had evolved into something more than a mentor-mentee relationship, more than a friendship. They were integral parts of a movement, the keepers of the conservative banner in Washington's clubby legal circles, where bright, young aspirants could be tapped by their elders and set on a path toward the most important legal jobs in the nation. Reared in the Ford and Reagan administrations, ascendant in George H.W.
Luttig can think of only one reason he would have been wrested out of quiet semiretirement for this mission.The books are always by his side, wherever Michael Luttig sits down to think. Massive dictionaries, writing manuals, anything that can inform his fixation with words, with the intricacies of their meanings and the ways they can be deployed.
He was just 37 years old when the first president Bush tapped him for the bench, the youngest federal appeals judge in the country, but already a veteran of the political world. His specialty: screening and prepping the Supreme Court nominees of Republican presidents. His home served as the so-called "safe-house" lodging for future justice David Souter, the night before Bush interviewed him for the job in 1990.
For all his perceived reliability as a conservative bulwark, Luttig could befuddle the political right. He ruled that Title IX protected a female place-kicker on an all-male football team from gender discrimination. He upheld a Black defendant's right to exclude a White juror who had displayed the Confederate flag. And in 2000 he declared that the constitutional right to abortion established with Roe v.
And so it was that one of the most celebrated legal minds of his generation failed to ascend to the highest court in the land - freeing him to play another, perhaps more consequential role. Once Cullen explained what Eastman was up to, Luttig told Cullen to advise Pence he simply could not block the certification. When Luttig hung up, his wife turned to him: "Oh my God, you have to stop this."
His 7-tweet thread, posted early on Jan. 5, offered Pence both legal and political cover. Luttig explained - as if speaking to first-year civics students - that, no, the vice president couldn't just change the vote total. And, no, refusing to do so didn't mean he was disloyal to the president. Luttig's spotlight appearance, a year and a half later, before the congressional committee investigating Trump's role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, was an even bigger deal - so highly anticipated that the text of his remarks was considered a news scoop. He'd refused to give an advance copy to the committee because he feared it would be leaked.
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