Former federal judge rips Washington Post over 14th Amendment editorial

Former federal judge Michael Luttig ripped The Washington Post’s Monday op-ed against invoking the 14th Amendment to disqualify former President Trump from the 2024 election, calling it “perhaps the most journalistically incompetent and irresponsible” piece he has ever read on the U.S. Constitution.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, includes a clause that states no person shall hold elected office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

Several experts, lawmakers and activists have argued this clause could disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot for his alleged actions in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Federal prosecutors have alleged the former president stood at the center of a campaign to block the certification of votes on Jan. 6.

Luttig took aim at the paper’s interpretation of the amendment.

“This editorial today by @washingtonpost is perhaps the most journalistically incompetent and irresponsible editorial on the Constitution of the United States and a question of constitutional law by a major national newspaper that I ever remember reading,” Luttig wrote Monday in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Luttig, a conservative appointed by former President George H.W. Bush who has repeatedly criticized Trump’s false election claims, claimed the op-ed titled “The 14th Amendment can’t save the country from Donald Trump” misquoted Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

The provision has already been cited in two lawsuits in Minnesota and Colorado seeking to keep Trump off the ballot.

The Post’s op-ed addresses several points of uncertainty over the provision, writing that the answers “in most instances, aren’t terribly clear.”

Luttig was responding to the beginning of the piece, wherein the Post’s editorial board calls the case for invoking the 14th Amendment “intriguing,” but that “banking on an arcane paragraph to protect the country from a second Trump term would be foolish.”

“The editorial inauspiciously begins by ‘misquoting’ the Disqualification Clause of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment itself, next dismissively pronouncing the argument for disqualification made by the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars as little more than intriguing and then admonishing the American public that ‘banking on an arcane paragraph to protect the country from a second Trump term would be foolish’ of them,” Luttig wrote in a later post on X.

Luttig also argued the Post does not actually explain why the American public should not be relying on the 14th Amendment.

“But it is probably because, as we see in the newspaper’s buried cynical lede in the concluding paragraph,” Luttig wrote. “The [Washington Post] fears the current Supreme Court will never interpret the Constitution to disqualify the former president, no matter what the Constitution says.”

Luttig was referencing the final paragraph of the op-ed that argued invoking the 14th Amendment would make its way to the Supreme Court, where the chance of Trump’s disqualification being affirmed “seem low,” and that the nation would be “better off” relying on votes to keep the former president out of the White House.

“One would at least expect that serious reasoning would have to follow in support of its warning that the American public’s resort to and reliance upon the Fourteenth Amendment would be ‘foolish,'” Luttig wrote. “Instead, what follows borders on, if it does not pass into, the silly and absurd.”

Luttig’s criticism follows an op-ed he co-wrote for The Atlantic in August where he encouraged the use of the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot.

Section 3 of the amendment has rarely been used since the period immediately following the Civil War and has never been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

Trump has dismissed the argument, claiming it has “no legal basis or standing” in connection to the 2024 election.

The Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.