'Astonishing and unprecedented': Conservative slams SCOTUS decision on Trump ballot

The Supreme Court's decision to restore former President Donald Trump to the ballot in Colorado and shut down any state decisions on Fourteenth Amendment disqualification was wrong, argued retired federal Judge Michael Luttig on CNN Monday.

Luttig, widely regarded as one of the founding intellectuals behind the modern-day conservative legal movement, has long been one of the strongest proponents of Colorado's decision, which had held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Insurrection Clause bars the former president from the ballot for his incitement of the January 6 attack.

"Judge Luttig, you predicted that the Supreme Court would affirm Colorado's decision to remove Trump from the ballot, calling Colorado's decision 'unassailable in every single respect under the Constitution,'" said anchor Jake Tapper. "I guess the justices didn't see it your way. What's your reaction?"

"Today's ruling, Jake, was both astonishing and unprecedented, not for its decision of the exceedingly narrow question presented by the case — though that issue was important — but rather for its decision to reach and decide a myriad of the other constitutional issues surrounding disqualification under the Fourteenth Amendment," said Luttig. "In reaching and deciding those questions unnecessarily, the court — the majority, as the concurrences said effectively — decided that the former president will never be disqualified from holding the presidency in 2024, or ever, for that matter. But even more importantly, as the concurrence said effectively, the court today decided that no person in the future will ever be disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless whether he or she has engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States."

Not only is the decision indefensible, argued Luttig, but it is — ironically — exactly the type of political interference from the bench that the conservative judicial movement he helped create, and that the sitting justices were raised in, was founded to stop.

"It's a textbook example, Jake, of the kind of activist judicial opinion from the 1960s, and the Warren Court era, that began the conservative legal and judicial movement in the 1970s and 1980s," said Luttig. "But of course, it's different here because this is unmistakably a conservative court, most of whose members were leaders of that conservative movement."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

Judge Michael Luttig criticizes Supreme Court ruling on Trumpwww.youtube.com