Conservative former federal judge: Midterms ‘a resounding victory for American democracy’

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and an informal adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, called the 2022 midterms “a resounding victory for American democracy” in a statement released Saturday.

“For America’s democracy, these midterms were the most important elections in our Nation’s history. And the elections were indisputably a resounding victory for American democracy,” wrote Luttig, an appointee of former President George H. W. Bush.

Luttig said that he considers elections not on partisan terms but rather on “the ‘constitutional’ terms of whether American Democracy won or lost.”

“On November 8, the American People did what I observed in a series of Constitution Day speeches this fall they had the power to do: dispossess those politicians who have betrayed them, of the power that they had vested in, and entrusted with, those politicians,” he continued.

The former appellate judge praised the “American experiment” for providing the people with power over their governance, including to “divest the demagogues and charlatans among their leaders who have betrayed them.”

Luttig testified in July before the House Jan. 6 select committee that Pence would have plunged the country “into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis” if he had obeyed former President Trump’s demand to reject the results of the 2020 election.

Leading up to the congressional certification, Trump pressured Pence publicly on Twitter to overturn the election results.

The former vice president pushed back against Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, citing reasoning from Luttig as to why he refused to do so.

“More recently, as the former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig observed, ‘[t]he only responsibility and power of the vice president under the Constitution is to faithfully count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast,’ adding ‘the Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain votes or otherwise,’” Pence wrote at the time.

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