After President Donald Trump expressed his outrage at Judge James Boasberg and called for his removal, it took almost no time at all for a freshman House Republican to volunteer to do the president’s bidding. Boasberg had tried to block Trump’s efforts to deport migrants under the Alien Enemies Act, leading the chief executive to lash out.
“I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do,” he posted on social media last Tuesday. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”
Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas quickly took Trump up on the offer, filing articles of impeachment against Boasberg within hours of Trump making the call. Gill asserted that in blocking Trump from using the law to conduct deportations, Boasberg was “usurping the role of the Executive and unilaterally taking upon himself the power and authority of the President.” In the week following, Gill found nearly 20 fellow House Republicans to co-sponsor his resolution.
Though the size of the cohort in the House clamoring for removing Boasberg, a Washington, D.C., district judge, is significant, House GOP leadership and Senate Republicans were less insistent on it as they returned to Washington, D.C., after a week of recess. Few Republicans have publicly denounced the call for Boasberg’s impeachment, but they are not giving full-throated endorsements either. “The president can say anything he wants to, and only the House impeaches,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Dispatch. Asked if he would vote to convict Boasberg if impeachment articles came to the Senate, he declined to answer: “Come on, I’m a juror. You can’t ask a juror what he’s going to do in a trial.”
Trump has once again put congressional Republicans in a bind by calling for action they would be hard-pressed to take. Impeaching Boasberg with the evidence Gill cites would be unprecedented. The House has impeached only 15 federal judges in the history of the United States, for criminal acts such as bribery or tax evasion, or for abuse of power. Not to mention, the Senate would be unlikely to play along. Even if all Republicans in the House voted to impeach the judge, there is no visible route toward the Senate producing the 67 votes it would need to convict him. At least one of the cosponsors to Gill’s resolution is acknowledging that. “It’d be tough over in the Senate, but we’ll have to see,” said Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia. “It’s time to rein these people in a little bit.”
But Republicans in both chambers are moving toward an alternative that would allow them not to explicitly buck the president. Currently, any district court can order an injunction that applies not only within its immediate jurisdiction but throughout the entire country. The day after Trump made his call for impeachment, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri proposed rolling back that power, called the nationwide injunction. The next day, Trump echoed Hawley’s call. On Monday, the Missouri senator introduced a bill, which would limit a district judge from providing injunctive relief beyond his or her jurisdiction.
Like most other Republicans, Hawley is not contradicting Trump’s call for impeachment of judges.
“I know he’s upset with these judges. I am too. I don’t like the rulings, and he’s perfectly entitled to criticize them,” he told The Dispatch.
But Hawley did make a pragmatic argument against removing judges.
“I would just say to my Republican colleagues: I’m really concerned about what’s going on,” he told reporters. “I don’t know that switching out the judges is going to ultimately do a whole lot, unless we address the systemic issue here, which is the use of this so-called power. So, I think we ought to just just make it clear. If you’re a district court, you can bind the parties who are in front of you or the parties who are in your district, but you can not bind people outside your purview.”
Hawley’s bill may be an avenue that allows congressional Republicans to show Trump they care about his grievances without totally endorsing his solution. That appears to be the direction House Republican leadership is going. Johnson has also not publicly taken steps to quiet the talk of impeaching Boasberg, his office saying that he would work with the House Judiciary Committee to “review all available options under the Constitution” to address judges “with political agendas.” But launching impeachment proceedings in the House would be time-intensive and unlikely to succeed at a moment when Johnson has other legislative battles to wage.
He has, however, praised a bill similar to Hawley’s.
“One of the bills that I really like that’s already been through committee was authored by Rep. Darrell Issa, and that would limit the scope of federal injunctions, the ability of one individual judge to abuse the system in this way,” he said at a Tuesday press conference. “And it would be, in my view, a dramatic improvement on that.”
Of course, Republicans have previously lauded judges’ issuances of nationwide injunctions. One recent such example is an April 2023 ruling by a Texas district judge blocking the expansion of access to abortion pills by President Joe Biden’s Food and Drug Administration.
Such an injunction would be more limited in its scope under legislation proposed by Issa, a California Republican who introduced in February his No Rogue Rulings Act, which would allow district judges to issue decisions that bind only parties to a particular case. Unlike Hawley’s bill, Issa’s bill would not allow a judge to issue a district-wide injunction. It passed out of the Judiciary Committee in early March.
Speaking to The Dispatch, Issa distinguished between the issue of impeachment and limiting the nationwide injunction. “There’s two different issues. The question of bad behavior and other things of that sort really has to be looked at differently than the question of whether this policy of a single judge out of 700, deciding to do nationwide injunctions—the growth of this, which was not intended when Congress created the lower courts, is one issue that we believe would reduce many of them.”
