Bipartisan Legal Group Urges Lawyers to Defend Against ‘Rising Authoritarianism’

A bipartisan American Bar Association task force is calling on lawyers across the country to do more to help protect democracy ahead of the 2024 election, warning in a statement to be delivered Friday at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago that the nation faces a serious threat in “rising authoritarianism.”

The statement by a panel of prominent legal thinkers and other public figures — led by J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George Bush, and Jeh C. Johnson, a Homeland Security secretary during the Obama administration — does not mention by name former President Donald J. Trump.

But in raising alarms, the panel appeared to be clearly referencing Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert his loss of the 2020 election, which included attacks on election workers who were falsely accused by Mr. Trump and his supporters of rigging votes and culminated in the violent attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in May that he would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Mr. Trump said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

In a joint interview, Judge Luttig and Mr. Johnson said their panel, called the Task Force for American Democracy, has been working for the past year, including meeting with election officials around the country, and developed what they described as a 90-page report proposing structural changes to strengthen elections on matters like the Electoral College and state voting systems.

But after the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump last month, they said it was too volatile a time to unveil that broader work. Instead, they decided to save it until 2025 and make a shorter statement at the annual meeting of the A.B.A. about what matters most for democracy in the next three months.

Mr. Johnson said the statement does not mention Mr. Trump by name because protecting democracy should be a bipartisan effort.

Judge Luttig — who has harshly criticized Mr. Trump, including in testimony before the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot — said concerns about the state of American democracy stemmed from the actions of Mr. Trump and “his Republicans,” but that it was important “not to paint all Republicans with the brush of Donald Trump.”

The statement specifically urges the more than 1.3 million Americans with law degrees to see it as their responsibility to help defend democracy and the rule of law at a time of misinformation, extreme polarization and the “normalization of political violence” including threats against “elected officials, members of the judicial branch and election workers.”

“Too many of us have taken our democracy, our rule of law, our civic norms and our freedoms for granted and have not done the hard work required to keep a free and fair democratic republic. The threats we are facing are real and they are existential,” it says, suggesting steps like volunteering to serve with the Election Official Legal Defense Network.

The A.B.A. describes itself as the largest voluntary association of lawyers in the world. While its democracy task force includes a number of liberals, it also includes conservatives mainly associated with the Republican Party before Mr. Trump transformed it.

Other conservative-associated members include Thomas B. Griffith, a retired federal appeals court judge; Maureen O’Connor, a former Ohio Supreme Court chief justice; Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman who ran in the 2016 G.O.P. primary; Bill Kristol, a commentator and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle; Larry Thompson, a former deputy attorney general; and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer.