Impeaching a Judge for Federalist Society Membership
Unitary Executive Theory, the Good Behavior Standard and the Role of the Senate
by Christopher Armitage
On June 29 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Trump v. Slaughter. Congress had built roughly two dozen regulatory bodies to operate outside presidential control, with fixed terms and removal only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. The Court held that design unconstitutional and overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 precedent that had permitted it for ninety-one years. Every one of those officials now serves at the president’s pleasure. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
The ruling completed a forty-year project that began in the Reagan administration. Unitary executive theory is one part of it, the claim that the president alone controls the entire executive branch. The rest is a body of rulings that place a president beyond prosecution, leave the disqualification clause unenforceable, remove the independence Congress built into the agencies, and apply constitutional principle selectively along partisan lines. Judges credentialed through a single organization delivered all of it, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse documented on the Senate floor that 86 percent of the first Trump administration’s Supreme Court and appellate nominees were or had been members.
The remedy follows from that completion. In my view, membership in the Federalist Society, the network that supplied them, is sufficient cause to impeach and remove a federal judge.
No comments:
Post a Comment