By invoking a wartime law linked to one of America’s most shameful legacies, Donald Trump found himself poised for a historic battle with the judiciary.
After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan noncitizens the government alleges are members of a criminal gang under the Alien Enemies Act, the president balked. Two planes carrying people alleged by Trump officials to be members of Tren de Aragua remained en route to their destination, in apparent defiance of the court’s order.
Were that not sufficient to provoke the court’s rebuke, allies of the Republican president including members of Congress are now directly calling for Judge James Boasberg to be impeached. Removal of a judge through the congressional impeachment process is part of the Constitution’s proscribed checks and balances for the federal government, but doing so on purely political grounds is unheard of.
Trump himself echoed those calls for Boasberg’s impeachment on Wednesday during a primetime interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News — though he stopped short of endorsing them directly, as he’d done on social media.
“I think at a certain point, you have to look at what do you do when you have a rogue judge,” was all Trump could suggest to Ingraham in terms of a threat.
Even so, a line has been crossed. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, issued a rare condemnation of the furor over Boasberg’s ruling this week, though the president continued to attack the Bush-appointed judge as a “radical leftist” during his interview and in social media postings.
“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,” Roberts said on Tuesday.
Federal attorneys are seeking the case’s removal from Boasberg’s courtroom, and may in the end avoid a conflict with a little judge-shopping. But if they don’t succeed, growing efforts to punish a judge who refuses to bend to the administration will almost certainly preclude further pushback from the Supreme Court.
“If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?” legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote this week. “We are inevitably headed, whether it’s in this case or another, to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.”
An actual impeachment push in Congress would put moderate Republicans in a familiar but impossibly tough position ahead of the midterms. Many, especially in the Senate, will be wary of the possibility that any attempt to interfere with the judiciary could open the door to future efforts by Democrats to reform the court system to their liking, including expansion of the Supreme Court bench.
Republicans, crucially, also do not control two-thirds of the Senate. No Democrat would sign on to an effort to impeach a federal judge over defiance of the Trump administration — if Mike Johnson or John Thune would even be willing to hold a vote, which they likely would not.
More than anything else, this latest debacle is an example of Trump’s ability to guide the GOP into unwinnable arguments, where the party’s moderate wing is politically squeezed and existing fractures within the House and Senate caucuses are stressed. The general rule on Capitol Hill is to never hand your opponents an issue with which they can divide your party. Trump has just done exactly that.
Leadership in the two chambers has so far avoided commenting on calls for an impeachment inquiry — but if the White House keeps up the pressure, that will change.
