The leading authority on the United States Supreme Court has issued a rare statement rebuking US President Donald Trump for calling for a federal judge’s impeachment.
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts released two short lines, neither of which mention Trump by name.
But his message was clear: Threatening a federal judge with impeachment is not acceptable.
“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,” the statement read.
Roberts’s remarks arrived within hours of Trump’s own social media missive, wherein he blasted Judge James E Boasberg, who serves in the federal district court in Washington, DC.
“This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post that seemed to argue that presidential authority superseded judicial power. “He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE.”
Boasberg recently ordered the Trump administration to halt deportations made under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows wartime presidents to detain and deport foreign nationals from a “hostile nation”.
The act had only been used three times before and only during war, the last instance being the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans and foreign nationals during World War II.
But the Trump administration proceeded with deportations under the act on Saturday evening, leading some to speculate it had openly violated Boasberg’s orders.
Boasberg himself has not yet ruled whether the Trump administration disobeyed the court’s orders. But he has called for lawyers from the US Department of Justice to deliver a timeline of when the deportation flights took off, as well as other information about the events of Saturday night.
Trump, however, called for Boasberg — who has been appointed to various positions in the justice system by Republican and Democratic presidents — to be removed from his post.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote on Tuesday morning.
Congress does indeed have the power to impeach federal judges, though such instances are rare.
The last federal judge to be impeached was G Thomas Porteous, who served in the eastern district of Louisiana: He was accused of accepting bribes and issuing false statements, leading to his removal from office in 2010.
This is not the first time Trump has made such a threat, though. In November 2023, for instance, as he faced a civil investigation into alleged fraud at the Trump Organization, Trump called for the impeachment of both the judge in the case and the lead prosecutor.
“Judge [Arthur] Engoron and Letitia James should be impeached and removed from office for fraudulently reducing my Asset Values, by many times, in order to hurt and demean me,” he wrote.
But since returning to office for a second term on January 20, Trump has faced a litany of legal challenges to many of his controversial policy changes.
Republicans have lined up behind him, echoing his criticisms of various judges as biased and corrupt.
Boasberg’s order on Saturday has spurred a new wave of such rhetoric, with several right-wing lawmakers calling for his removal.
“Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country. This time to benefit foreign gang members,” Senator Chuck Grassley wrote on social media.
Representative Brandon Gill, meanwhile, said he had filed articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives against the “radical activist” Boasberg.
“He is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office,” Gill posted on his social media on Tuesday.
Even Elon Musk, a donor to Trump’s re-election campaign and a White House adviser, weighed in on Monday.
“The very worst judges – those who repeatedly flout the law – should at least be put to an impeachment vote, whether that vote succeeds or not,” Musk said on his social media platform X.
But Chief Justice Roberts has long defended the court system against such pressure.
Last year, in his year-end report, Roberts similarly denounced attempts by lawmakers to push for impeachment on political grounds.
“Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote.
“Within the past year we also have seen the need for state and federal bar associations to come to the defense of a federal district judge whose decisions in a high-profile case prompted an elected official to call for her impeachment. Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”
The American Bar Association has likewise noted the trend as Trump’s second term unfolds.
“There have been calls to impeach ‘corrupt judges’ with no effort to produce evidence of the so called ‘corruption’,” the association wrote in a statement on March 3.
“These have been directed only at judges who have ruled against the government position.”
