Trump and GOP House escalate war against the judiciary

Talk of impeaching judges who stand in the way of President Trump is growing among Republicans in Congress.

Talk of impeaching Trump is also growing among Democrats in Congress who see him refusing to follow rulings by judges, including the Supreme Court justices.

Last week, the talk led to action. Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) filed impeachment articles against Trump, citing his open defiance of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling against deporting an undocumented immigrant without a hearing in the Abrego Garcia case.

“Donald Trump has already done real damage to our democracy,” Thanedar said. “But defying the Supreme Court — that has to be the final straw. It’s time we impeach Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s attacks on judges are “designed to intimidate,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson added at a judicial conference last week.

Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders in the House have introduced articles of impeachment against judges who are ruling against Trump. The drive to oust the judges comes from Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and Brandon Gill (R-Texas). It is being cheered — and rewarded — by Elon Musk. Trump’s biggest donor is also giving to the campaigns of the three driving the idea of impeaching judges.

Trump is calling for impeaching judges while also attacking them. His FBI arrested a Wisconsin judge last month, Judge Hannah Duggan, for allegedly preventing federal agents from arresting an undocumented immigrant while the man was in her court on unrelated charges. Judge Duggan’s supporters point out that her job is to keep her courtroom safe for crime victims, witnesses and even defendants. She wants them to enter without fear of being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The man was later arrested on the street.

The calls for impeaching judges are putting House Speaker Mike Johnson in an uncomfortable position. There is no win for him in a fiery, time-consuming confrontation between the legislature and the judiciary. Now Johnson is floating a radical compromise: stripping courts of jurisdiction.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures ... We do have authority over the federal courts,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have the power of funding over the courts.”

Johnson and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), another hardline Trump supporter, are also trying to sidestep the risk of impeaching judges by giving attention to a bill to ban nationwide judicial injunctions.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is pushing that bill — an extreme measure in its own right — but among the current GOP majority locked into Trump’s orbit, it is being sold as avoiding the explosive dangers posed by congressional hearings to impeach judges.

Meanwhile, in direct defiance of federal court orders, Trump continues deporting undocumented immigrants on suspicion of criminal activity without giving them due process. Last week, he told ABC News that a tattoo was evidence that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, even though the tattoo appears to be photoshopped on his hand.

The Supreme Court has ordered Trump to “facilitate” the return of that man, wrongly deported to El Salvador. But the president is ignoring them, leaving the immigrant trapped in an Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights abuses.

Trump’s disrespect for the court order led Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a conservative Reagan appointee, to write, “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order ... This should be shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Yet the administration’s abuse of legal protections grows bolder. Last week, reports emerged about Trump deporting a two-year-old American citizen and a four-year-old citizen with a medical condition to Honduras — with no due process, no recourse and no medication for the child.

Also, Trump’s lawyers, as reported in the New York Times, rebuffed a judge’s “demand for information about the administration’s decision to finish transferring a group of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, despite his order to turn planes around.”

The Times story noted that previous presidents were restrained by legal guidance from the Justice Department. But not Trump. He has “largely sidelined” the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the Times reported. Senior White House officials argue that because Trump won the presidential election, he can bypass judges, citing the “mandate of the electorate.”

These Trump lawyers and immigration officials acting above the law apparently learned nothing from the ruin that befell Trump officials in his first term, people such as Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. They have been sanctioned and ostracized for their roles in Trump’s 2020 coup attempt.

The most chilling possibility is that the new crop expects to be pardoned before Trump leaves office. We’ve already seen Trump abuse the pardon power, freeing hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, some convicted of violence in service to his lies.

Does anyone doubt he would pardon the Cabinet secretaries carrying out his orders? Or the immigration agents ripping families apart, shackling them and putting them on the planes?

When the pardons come, Trump will claim that Biden did the same. That will be the real point of no return — the moment the rule of law risks a total collapse.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”