Why 'Impeach This Judge' Threats Almost Never Work

Fifteen. That's how many federal judges the House of Representatives has voted to impeach since 1803 — 222 years of a judiciary that now numbers roughly 870 active judgeships. Only eight of those fifteen were actually convicted by the Senate and removed. Every single one of the eight was removed for something like bribery, perjury or a criminal conviction. None were removed for a ruling a president or a member of Congress simply didn't like.

That history is the backdrop for a wave of impeachment resolutions filed in the House starting in February 2025, after a run of federal district judges issued early rulings against Trump administration policies on federal spending, deportations and access to Treasury payment systems. Six judges were targeted by name: Paul Engelmayer, John Bates, John McConnell, Amir Ali, James Boasberg and Theodore Chuang. None of the resolutions alleged a crime. Each one argued, in different words, that the judge's ruling itself was the offense.

The only lever that exists

Article III of the Constitution gives federal judges tenure during "good Behaviour," which in practice has always been read as tenure for life. There's no mandatory retirement age, no re-election, no legislature that can simply vote a sitting judge out. The only exit ramp built into the system is impeachment: a majority of the House votes to bring articles of impeachment, then the Senate holds a trial and needs a two-thirds vote to convict and remove. The constitutional standard for removal, laid out in Article II, is "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" — the same language used for removing a president.

That's a high bar by design, and the record shows it's been used almost exactly as the framers seem to have intended. Looking at cases from the last 40 years alone: Harry Claiborne was impeached in 1986 for tax evasion and staying on the bench after a criminal conviction. Alcee Hastings was impeached in 1988 for perjury and soliciting a bribe. Walter Nixon was impeached in 1989 for perjury before a grand jury. Samuel Kent was impeached in 2009 for sexual assault and obstructing an official proceeding. Thomas Porteous was impeached in 2010 for accepting bribes and committing perjury. Every one of those cases involved conduct that had nothing to do with how the judge ruled from the bench.

Why the framers built it this way

Alexander Hamilton made the case for lifetime tenure directly in the Federalist Papers, arguing that the judiciary was the "least dangerous" branch precisely because it controlled neither the sword nor the purse — no army, no budget, nothing to coerce compliance with except the strength of its reasoning. If judges could be pulled from the bench whenever their rulings angered whoever held power at the moment, Hamilton's argument goes, that check would disappear, and courts would start ruling with an eye on their own job security rather than the law. Job security, in this framing, isn't a perk. It's the mechanism that lets a judge rule against a sitting president without checking the political weather first.

That argument got a very public airing in March 2025. After President Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that a judge who had blocked a deportation policy "should be IMPEACHED!!!", Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement: 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. Two federal appeals judges, Jeffrey Sutton and Richard Sullivan — one appointed by George W. Bush, the other by Trump himself in his first term — made a similar point to reporters days earlier. If we dilute the standards for impeachment, Sutton warned, that's not just a problem for judges, that's a problem for all three branches of government.

What the threats actually accomplish

None of the 2025 resolutions came close to passing; each would need a majority in a closely divided House and then a two-thirds Senate vote that no set of judicial rulings has ever produced. In that narrow sense, the threats are close to symbolic. But symbolism has a cost here that it doesn't have in most political fights. The U.S. Marshals Service, which protects federal judges and courthouses, logged 564 threats against judges in fiscal year 2025, part of a pattern serious enough that Congress passed a law in 2022, after the killing of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas's son at her home, aimed at making it harder to find judges' addresses online. Impeachment resolutions and hostile social media posts don't cause that violence directly. But judges who study the pattern argue that eroding the norm that rulings are off-limits for removal makes every other kind of pressure on the bench a little more thinkable.

The mechanism itself hasn't changed and isn't likely to. What's changed is how often it gets invoked as a threat rather than reserved, as it was for two centuries, for judges who broke the law rather than judges who ruled against the party in power. Whether that shift sticks as a new political habit or fades as these particular resolutions quietly die in committee is the open question hanging over the next few years of federal litigation — and over every district judge who signs an order knowing exactly whose desk it's about to land on.

For related coverage of the judiciary checking executive power, see Daybreak Wire's report on the Supreme Court blocking Trump's attempt to fire the Fed's Lisa Cook, and for another procedural check built into the Constitution, see how pro forma sessions block presidential recess appointments.