The impeachment issue is an idle threat, and doesn't address the real problem anyway. The problem with the judiciary is far deeper than one or two or twelve or twenty judges. Until this specific case, there was not much interest in doing something about it. There still might not be much interest. See post 271. The reason Congress should assert itself has to do with the judiciary's decision to tell COngress to pound sand on the de novo hearing requirement but also on the subpeona. Judge Greer and federal judges (including Birch) told Congress that the legislative branch has no powers other than what the judicial branch grants it. THat position is a natural outgrowth of the last thirty years of judicial activism.
The ethics charges against DeLay are a red herring and merely personalizes the issue. Whether DeLay is in Congress or not does not change the nature of the problem between the legislative and judicial branches.
That is not what happened. Congress did not purport to change the rules of federal court procedure, and if they had, the law would never have made it out of the Senate. The Whittemore case acceped de novo jurisdiction, at least for the moment, and then applied the unchanged law and rules to consider an injunction motion. You may not like it, but that was and remains the law. I suspect in time the law would have been deemed unconstitutional, but that was not in play here, and will not be, because the case is now moot.