Revealed: Conservative Judge says he's not a Republican anymore
Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday, former Mike Pence adviser and conservative judge Michael Luttig confessed he's not really a Republican anymore.
Wallace previously worked in George W. Bush's White House, before helping the late Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. In recent years, she distanced herself from the party before formally changing her voter registration. She's long been sounding the alarm that her former party was falling into a cult of personality around Donald Trump instead of policies and ideas.
"I want to ask you a personal question," Wallace began. "I wouldn't put myself at your stature level but I parted with the Republican Party when it embraced Donald Trump who announced his candidacy by talking about people from Mexico as rapists and murderers and I have never looked back. But it can be lonely and I wonder what the experience has been like for you in your very high-level legal circles to part so publicly with the standard bearer of the party you are in."
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Luttig said that the solidarity aspect of the GOP wasn't even a consideration because he's never been a "political person" or a "political partisan."
"I held the views, the beliefs and the principles and the policy positions of the Republican Party my entire lifetime. I no longer hold the same views that they do, so I do not consider myself a Republican except in name only," Luttig confessed. In the past few years, Trump has used the "Republican in name only" or RINO moniker as a pejorative.
"To your question, your personal question, it troubles me a great deal where the Republican Party finds itself today and the direction in which it is headed. I just — I'm eternally hopeful that the party will come to its collective senses and its constitutional senses, in particular, because if it doesn't, it will never be the Republican Party that it has been up to this date."
Wallace said that it's clear to her that the GOP is turning into one of the largest "autocratic-curious" groups in the country. She asked Judge Luttig if he ever wonders why there aren't any others screaming loudly about it as he is.
"Today there is no Republican Party," he said, calling on what the country has, in the past, considered to be a political party. It's a sentiment he echoed to CNN earlier in Aug.
“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties," he explained at the time. "So today, in my view, there is no Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party in the country. And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”
This week, Luttig joined with Harvard's constitutional law expert, Laurence Tribe, to pen a column explaining that they believe Donald Trump can be barred from office using the 14th Amendment.
See the final part of his interview with Wallace below or at the link here.
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