BURSTRepublican senators are warning that any efforts to impeach James Boasberg, the judge who ruled against President Trump's deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members and is now handling a lawsuit related to senior Trump officials’ use of Signal, would be dead on arrival in the Senate.
Senior Senate Republicans also say they will oppose any effort by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to defund federal courts that rule against Trump's agenda, sending a message that they want to de-escalate Trump’s war against the federal judiciary.
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) introduced an article of impeachment against Boasberg earlier this month citing “abuse of power.” It already has 22 co-sponsors.
Johnson separately has floated the idea of simply eliminating courts that rule against Trump.
The Senate voted 96-0 to confirm Boasberg to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in March 2011, with yes votes coming from Republicans still in the chamber such as Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), John Cornyn (Texas), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mitch McConnell (Ky) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.).
And while the Senate has become more partisan over the past 14 years, many Republican view themselves as the stewards of the federal judiciary and are not fond of Trump’s escalating war of words with the third branch, which in some cases have been echoed enthusiastically by Trump’s House allies.
Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached after the judge ruled he could not invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 people, including alleged gang members, without a hearing.
That earned a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who noted that “for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial opinion.”
The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to overturn Boasberg’s order.
Senate Republicans are pleading with Trump and his allies to cool it with the courts.
“We’re not even 100 days in [to the new administration]. We just can’t be impeaching every judge that we don’t like their decisions on,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).
“The threats about going after judges and then going after attorneys who are going to file lawsuits — and not only forward but going back eight years to see who’s done what” doesn’t make sense, she added.
Cornyn, the former Senate GOP whip and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said the prospect of removing Boasberg or any other federal judge from the bench because Trump and his allies disagree with their rulings is a fantasy.
“It’s not going to happen,” he said. “The numbers aren’t there.”
Cornyn's comment reflected the simple math problem any impeachment effort would face.
Republicans would need to muster a two-thirds vote to convict a judge of an impeachment charge and remove that person from office. Republicans now control 53 Senate seats, which means they would need 14 Democrats to support a conviction.
“I think the focus ought to be on things like Darrell Issa’s bill that just passed the [House] Judiciary Committee dealing with nationwide injunctions. To me, that’s been an abuse of power by district judges,” Cornyn said, referring to the Republican representative from California.
Issa’s four-page bill, the No Rogue Rulings Act, would limit the power of judges such as Boasberg from imposing nationwide injunctions. It would restrict injunctive relieve only to the parties of a case before the district court.
House GOP leaders plan to hold a vote on the legislation this coming week.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) says he’s willing to advance legislation to curb the use of nationwide injunctions by district court-level judges.
But Grassley is warning House colleagues that any articles of impeachment passed in the House to retaliate against judges who rule against Trump won’t go anywhere in the Senate.
“You can’t impeach a judge just because you disagree with their opinion,” Grassley told Fox News when asked about calls to impeach lower-court judges who have blocked elements of Trump’s agenda.
“We’ve got to be a legislative body. I know the president is irritated with some of these judges and I don’t blame him, but you can’t impeach a judge just because you disagree with an opinion,” he said.
Grassley plans to hold a hearing April 2 to explore “legislative solutions to the bipartisan problem of universal injunctions.”
Given the difficulty of mustering enough votes in the Senate to remove a judge from the bench, Johnson and other House Republicans are looking more seriously at defunding or eliminating courts that emerge as an obstacle to Trump’s agenda.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday at the Capitol.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act,” he warned.
Republicans would be in a better position to defund a court than impeach a judge, as they control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Democrats earlier this month accepted a partisan House GOP-drafted government funding bill because they feared a government shutdown would empower Trump and Elon Musk to accelerate their efforts to fire federal workers and shrink government agencies.
But Senate Republicans are warning Johnson not to attempt to defund any courts, even if they block core elements of Trump’s agenda.
“No, I think there’s a better way of doing [it], which is limit the effect of a single district judge to affect nationwide policy. The court actually has a procedure to do that but it ain’t working. That’s the solution,” said Graham, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Graham said Grassley is working on a bill to do that.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said he is firmly opposed to defunding courts.
“I’ve watched Democratic colleagues for four years under President Biden try to undermine the federal judiciary, pack the Supreme Court, try to write a punitive ethics law [for the Supreme Court] … [and] threaten them if they ruled a particular way on a particular issue,” Kennedy said.
“I did not support that and I don’t support the efforts now to undermine” the federal courts, he said.
Kennedy said the president and his allies have the right to criticize federal court orders that defy their agenda and to appeal those rulings to higher courts.
But he warned they must still comply with those decisions.
“You don’t have the right to — just unilaterally because you disagree with it — defy a court order,” he said.
The Trump administration got into a heated fight with Boasberg after it appeared to ignore his verbal and written order to halt two deportation flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members.
The flights continued to El Salvador after touching down in Honduras, even after Boasberg had ordered them to turn around.
The judge, who was appointed by former President Obama, vowed to “get to the bottom” of whether the administration violated his order and to know “who ordered” the flights to continue.