US Chief Justice Roberts rebukes Trump over call for judge’s impeachment

Donald Trump’s rumbling conflict with the judiciary burst into open confrontation on Tuesday as Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of the US president over his call for the impeachment of a federal judge. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a brief statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” Roberts’s extraordinary rebuke of the president came after Trump called for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered the suspension over the weekend of deportation flights of alleged illegal migrants. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. The White House has been sharply critical of district courts which have blocked some of the president’s executive actions but this was the first time Trump has personally called for a judge’s impeachment since he took office in January. Federal judges are nominated by the president for life and can only be removed by being impeached by the House of Representatives for “high crimes or misdemeanours” and convicted by the Senate. Impeachment of federal judges is exceedingly rare and the last time a judge was removed by Congress was in 2010. Several hours after Trump’s post, Brandon Gill, a Republican lawmaker from Texas, announced on X that he had introduced articles of impeachment in the House against Boasberg, whom he described as a “radical activist judge”. Trump, the first convicted felon to serve in the White House, has a history of attacking the judges who presided over his civil and criminal cases. Boasberg ordered a suspension on Saturday to the deportation flights taking alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador where they were put in prison. The White House invoked little-used wartime legislation known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as legal justification for the move. However, no evidence has been made public to confirm the deportees were gang members or even in the country illegally. Boasberg held a hearing on Monday on whether the White House had deliberately ignored his orders by carrying out the flights. Justice Department lawyers told the judge the more than 200 Venezuelan migrants had already left the United States when he issued a written order barring their departure. Boasberg no longer had jurisdiction once the planes had left US airspace, they claimed. The Justice Department had previously filed a motion with an appeals court seeking to have the judge removed from the case for allegedly interfering with the president’s lawful “conduct of foreign policy”. Trump, in his Truth Social post, called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama”. Trump said the judge “was not elected President”. “I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY,” he wrote. The Yale-educated Boasberg, 62, was appointed to the DC Superior Court by president George W. Bush, a Republican, and later named a district court judge by Obama, a Democrat. The statement by Roberts, a conservative who was also appointed by Bush, echoes one from 2018, when Roberts defended the judiciary’s independence after persistent attacks by Trump during his first term in office. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement at the time. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” Roberts added. Trump has appointed three of the justices to the nine-member Supreme Court himself. A narrow majority of Supreme Court justices that included Roberts brushed Trump back in a pair of procedural rulings issued since Trump re-entered the White House on January 20. On February 21, the court declined to let Trump immediately fire the head of a federal watchdog agency after a judge’s order temporarily blocked the dismissal. On March 5, the court declined to let Trump’s administration withhold payment to foreign aid organisations for work they already performed for the government. The court meanwhile was weighing Trump’s March 13 request asking it to intervene in his bid to curb automatic US birthright citizenship. Additional reporting by Reuters

US Chief Justice Roberts rebukes Trump over call for judge’s impeachment

Roberts defends judiciary’s independence against Trump attacks, emphasises impeachment is not for judicial disagreements