Ted Cruz’s mentor blasts GOP for not standing up to Trump’s ‘utter madness’

A former Republican judge who was "like a father" to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has grown impatient with the Republican Party enabling Donald Trump's ongoing assault on democracy.

"It’s been a measure of former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig’s stature in the conservative legal movement that Supreme Court justices hired so many of his law clerks — 40 over 15 years. Then two of those proteges became (in)famous: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump lawyer John C. Eastman, lead actors in the plot to overturn Joe Biden’s election. Now Luttig is doing penance of a sort: He’s joined the Resistance — against former President Trump, certainly, but also against his erstwhile mentees," Jackie Calmes reported for the Los Angeles Times.

Calmes reported how Luttig counseled Mike Pence two days before Jan. 6, explaining to the vice president that he did not have the power to overturn the will of the voters.

"Pence, in his letter to Congress ahead of the proceedings, name-checked Luttig to argue that a vice president has no such power," Calmes noted. "For Pence, the opinion of a jurist so revered on the right was “armor” against the inevitable slings and arrows from the MAGA army, as conservative lawyer George Conway put it to me. Luttig told me he’s testified behind closed doors about his role to investigators for the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection."

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Luttig expanded on his thoughts in an email to Calmes.

“This feels like a seminal moment in America when all of what the country has witnessed and endured for these years seems to be building to volcanic crescendo…. We are in political war to the death — with each other,” he said, adding that “American democracy hangs in the balance."

Luttig complained that Republicans were not standing up to the "nonsense, this utter madness" and said it is "the definition of failed leadership.

Luttig is not shying away from putting his former clerks in an uncomfortable position on the issue of Trump's insurrection.

"That brings us back to Cruz and Eastman. They not only haven’t stood up to the madness, but they also exemplify it — Cruz by leading a cabal of Republicans who opposed certification of Biden votes on Jan. 6, and by his general Trump toadyism, and Eastman by his authorship of the memo giving a false constitutional gloss to Trump’s coup strategy," Calmes wrote. "The 67-year-old Luttig, relatively new to Twitter, has trolled his former clerks like a pro. Anyone familiar with the bonds typical between a judge and his or her clerks — Luttig’s call themselves 'Luttigators' — knows that his public chastisements have to bother Eastman and even the seemingly impervious-to-criticism Cruz, who once described Luttig as “like a father to me.”

Read the full report.