Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig said Monday he supports President Biden’s proposal to amend the Constitution to counter recent Supreme Court decisions that give former presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions while in office.
The amendment would partially overturn the landmark immunity ruling by clarifying that former presidents do not enjoy immunity from federal criminal prosecution, but the No Person Above the Law Amendment does not apply to state prosecutions.
“I reject the Supreme Court’s bad faith ruling in Trump v. United States and support a constitutional amendment that would restore the driving principle of our country and our Constitution that no person, especially the President of the United States, is above the law,” Luttig said. I wrote in the post On social media platform X.
Luttig, a longtime conservative judge, strongly criticized the July 1 ruling, which handed former President Trump a major victory by invalidating some of the criminal charges against him.
In a 6-3 ruling handed down earlier this month, the court ruled that the president has absolute immunity for actions taken within the scope of his primary official responsibilities and has presumed immunity for all other official acts.
In a statement Monday, Judge Luttig called the immunity ruling “abhorrent” and said, “With this decision, the Supreme Court has cut to the heart of American democracy and the rule of law.”
“You can no longer say that no one in America is above the law, because on that day the Supreme Court ruled that the president of the United States, and particularly former presidents of the United States, is in fact above the law,” he added.
The plan was announced after the president dropped out of the 2024 presidential race earlier this month and endorsed Vice President Harris as his lead nominee. In a national address last week, Biden said he would spend much of the remainder of his term reforming the Supreme Court.
The constitutional amendment was one of three major court reform proposals the president unveiled on Monday. He also called for term limits for judges and binding ethics rules. The announcement marked a major shift for Biden, who has long resisted reform demands from the left.
“This country was founded on the principle that in America we have no king,” Biden said in his speech Monday. “We all operate lawfully, according to the law. No one is above the law. In effect, this court’s decision means that a president can almost certainly break his oath of office and ignore the law with no consequences.”
Luttig has in recent years been one of the most prominent conservative critics of Trump and his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election to Biden. The former judge also testified at House hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
He has also criticized past Supreme Court decisions regarding Trump, including finding that the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause does not disqualify a former president from voting.
