The sitting US president had once considered nominating one of the judges to the US Supreme Court
Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
US President Donald Trump’s attempt to impeach Washington-based District Judge James Boasberg has been denounced by federal appeals judges William Pryor, Jeffrey Sutton, and Richard Sullivan – all three of whom were appointed by the Republican political party backing Trump.
This comes after conservative Chief US Supreme Court Justice John Roberts reprimanded Trump’s response to Boasberg’s refusal to allow the president to use wartime powers to deport Venezuelan immigrants. Roberts’ rare statement, which did not directly name Trump, said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” according to a snippet published by Reuters.
Pryor, who is the chief judge of the Atlanta-based US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, voiced his support of Roberts in an interview on Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar’s “America's Constitution” podcast.
"All the chief justice did, I thought modestly and appropriately, was to point out the unbroken tradition in American history that we don't impeach judges for decisions that are unpopular or that we may think are wrong or right, whatever it may be, wrong, controversial," Pryor said in a snippet published by Reuters.
Pryor said that Roberts’ statement was “modest and factual.”
“We have a remedy for correcting decisions that we may think are wrong. But that process is not impeachment, it's an appeal,” Pryor said, echoing the point made by Roberts in his statement.
While both Republican and Democrat leaders had called for similar impeachments in recent years, it was “a little more unusual perhaps when the president, who has the executive power, says something,” Pryor said in the interview, which was released last Thursday.
Including Boasberg, six federal judges face impeachment resolutions filed by Trump’s allies, which include billionaire Elon Musk, in the US House of Representatives. All these judges had opposed initiatives pushed by the Trump administration to cut federal jobs and budgets, according to Reuters.
Pryor was appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush and was shortlisted by Trump as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court in 2017. Sutton sits in the Cincinnati-based US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, while Sullivan sits in the New York-based 2nd Circuit.
