MSNBC producer Steve Benen said impeaching judges who make President Donald Trump unhappy is apparently back on the menu for MAGA Republicans.
“While there was quite a bit of talk in Republican circles earlier this year about impeaching judges, the chatter largely disappeared in recent months,” said Benen. But Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) appears poised to bring it back.
“The history of our great country has been you don’t impeach judges for stupid decisions, or bad decisions, what we, and common sense, would say is a poor decision,” Jordan told the Washington Post. “But I don’t think you should rule out impeachment.”
Several judges have drawn the animosity of Trump and his GOP subsidiaries in the House and Senate. U.S. District Judge April Perry recently questioned the Trump administration’s credibility in justifying stationing National Guard troops in Illinois to prevent extreme violence.
Chicago Public Media reported that Perry concluded the Trump administration’s “perception of events” around Chicago “are simply unreliable.” She’d seen “no credible evidence that there is danger of rebellion in the state of Illinois,” nor that Trump “is unable … to execute the laws of the United States.”
Decisions like these, apparently, are bringing impeachment options back into consideration among Senate Republicans.
“You use every avenue you can, and then if you have to go to impeachment, that’s something that should be on the table,” said Jordan.
Federal judges serve lifetime appointments and can’t be fired, but they can be impeached and, if convicted by the Senate, removed from office.
Benen writes that Trump himself has called for the removal of judges who annoy him as far back as March.
“[W]e have bad judges. We have very bad judges,” Trump said, according to Benen. “These are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point you have to start looking at — what do you do when you have a rogue judge?”
“There was, of course, no evidence in support of any of this rhetoric,” said Benen, but that did not stop congressional Republicans from interpreting “Trump’s appeal as a directive and got to work introducing impeachment resolutions against judges who’ve ruled in ways the White House didn’t like.”
Benen added that removing judges over anti-Trump rulings is very unpopular with Americans, with one Marquette University Law School poll finding that 70 percent of Americans opposed the tactic.
“There is, however, often a big gap between what the public wants and what Republican officials decide to do,” Benen said.
Read Benen's MSNBC column at this link.