As a matter of course, journalists contact the U.S. Supreme Court for comment with some regularity, though the results are nearly always the same: The justices and their offices generally decline to weigh in.
There are, however, very rare exceptions.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a highly unusual statement on Tuesday morning, for example, that read, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
It’s worth appreciating what precipitated these rather pointed comments.
In the run-up to Election Day, Donald Trump invested a fair amount of time condemning those who criticize judges — conveniently ignoring his own record of criticizing jurists who’ve dared to rule in ways he disagreed with. Six months ago, the Republican went so far as to eventually declare, “These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges.”
To a degree, the president’s line hasn’t changed. As recently as Friday, Trump delivered unhinged remarks at the Justice Department, where he defended U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed conservative who helped dismiss his classified documents case. Referring to her many critics, the president told the law enforcement officials in the audience, “It’s totally illegal what they do.”
Four days later, Politico reported on the president calling for a different federal district court judge’s impeachment.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the federal judge who ordered a two-week halt to his efforts to remove Venezuelan migrants using extraordinary war powers that haven’t been invoked for decades. Trump’s call to remove U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. — is the first time since taking office for his second term that he’s asked Congress to seek a judge’s removal, joining increasingly pointed calls by his top donor and adviser Elon Musk and a segment of his MAGA base.
Apparently furious about Boasberg’s handling of the Alien Enemies Act litigation, the president published an especially enraged item to his social media platform, referring to the federal district court judge as a “Radical Left Lunatic,” a “troublemaker” and an “agitator.” After a series of all-caps claims about the fact that the jurist isn’t an elected official — in this country, federal judges aren’t chosen by voters — Trump concluded, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”
If this talk sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. As Jay Willis recently summarized at Balls and Strikes, Elon Musk 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.”
Similar talk has become relatively common on Capitol Hill. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for example, recently posted 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 earlier this month that read, “This has the feel of a coup — not a military coup, but a judicial one.”
In the U.S. House, a handful of Republican members have introduced four separate impeachment resolutions targeting sitting federal judges, and that total is likely to grow: Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee recently hosted an online “impeachathon” event, displaying a poster of 11 judges he and his far-right colleagues are focused on. The far-right congressman appeared alongside a caption that read “Woke Judge Hunter.” (A clip of the event was promoted by Musk.)
While Boasberg wasn’t part of the 11, Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas announced this week that he plans to file articles of impeachment against this judge in the coming days.
This campaign, however, has been largely relegated to the fringe. There are over 250 GOP lawmakers across the House and the Senate, and the total number of Republicans talking about impeaching federal judges is, as a quantitative matter, fairly small. Few, if any, credible observers have predicted that the impeachment push would ever be taken seriously on Capitol Hill.
But it’s against this backdrop that the sitting Republican president has decided to throw his weight behind an impeachment effort — not because Boasberg committed high crimes or abused his office, but because the judge is handling an important case in a way Trump doesn’t like.
The White House has been engaged in an intensifying fight with the judicial branch, and there’s been growing speculation about whether the administration might consider defying court rulings that the president doesn’t like. With his impeachment call, Trump just took that fight to a new level.
This post has been updated to include Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ comments.
