The more the White House loses court fights, the more Elon Musk targets federal judges who dare to rule in ways he doesn’t like. As Jay Willis summarized at Balls and Strikes, the Republican megadonor has been “posting incessantly, calling for the impeachment of ‘fake,’ ‘corrupt,’ ‘activist’ judges for ‘violating the will of the people.’ His timeline … is littered with conspiratorial screeds about the dastardly ulterior motives that these judges must have had for preventing an unelected billionaire from assuming the power of the legislative and executive branches all for himself.”

But while Donald Trump’s top campaign donor can apparently do quite a bit through his DOGE endeavor, he can’t launch impeachment campaigns against members of the judiciary. At least for now, that power still rests in the hands of Congress.

The trouble, of course, is that Musk’s ideas are finding favor among some Republicans on Capitol Hill. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, last week published a message to social media that read, “Corrupt judges should be impeached. And removed.” It came on the heels of a similar message Lee published that read, “This has the feel of a coup — not a military coup, but a judicial one.”

Meanwhile, in the House, there are now four separate pending impeachment resolutions targeting sitting federal judges, including two sponsored by Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee. The list is likely to grow: Ogles hosted an online “impeachathon” event last week, displaying a poster of 11 judges he and his far-right colleagues are focused on.

Ogles appeared alongside a caption that read “Woke Judge Hunter.” A clip of the event was promoted soon after by Musk himself.

It’s difficult to say with confidence what these lawmakers hope to achieve, since the odds of the House actually approving an impeachment resolution are effectively nonexistent, but if Republican proponents of the campaign are trying to intimidate judges into submission, they’re apparently failing. My MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin highlighted a brutal judicial smackdown:

“An American President is not a king,” a federal judge wrote in ruling against President Donald Trump on Thursday. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., made the stark statement in rejecting Trump’s bid to fire Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board.

It was quite a ruling. “The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law,” Howell wrote. She added, “The Framers, anticipating such a power grab, vested in Article III, not Article II, the power to interpret the law, including resolving conflicts about congressional checks on presidential authority. The President’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power — or, more aptly, his aspiration — is flat wrong.”

In a message that appeared designed specifically for the Oval Office, the jurist concluded, “An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here. … A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.”

Ouch.

This came on the heels of a ruling from last month in which U.S. District Judge John Coughenour — named to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan — not only rejected Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, he also took aim at the president’s twisted approach to the law.

“It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Coughenour wrote. “The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain. Nevertheless, in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.

“The Constitution,” the judge added, “is not something the government can play policy games with.”

These are hardly the only recent examples of Trump facing judicial eloquence in the midst of a legal setback — some of the rulings in Jan. 6 cases are especially notable — and given the scope of the lawsuits surrounding the White House’s agenda, it probably won’t be the last.

Ogles might very well add to his “impeachathon” list, but there’s little to suggest members of the judiciary are feeling intimidated.