J. Michael Luttig spoke softly and sometimes haltingly when he testified Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His understated presentation belied the five-alarm fire that was his written statement — a loud and clear warning to a country whose democracy, he said, is on “a knife’s edge.”
Luttig was there because he had advised Vice President Mike Pence that Pence could not legally do what President Donald Trump wanted him to do, which was to interject himself in the process of ratifying the electoral count on Jan. 6 and prepare the ground to have the election overturned.
But the former federal appellate court judge far more than demolished the legal arguments Trump had bought into. His prepared statement was a clear-and-present-danger document, describing the fraught state of American democracy, the war that rages internally, and the role Trump and his followers have played to bring us to this moment.
Jan. 6, Luttig said, was a war within a broader war over the future of the country, “a war irresponsibly instigated by the former president and his political allies, and his supporters.” The war rages today, he added, and “as a political matter of fact,...
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