Per the Article:
During Thomas Jefferson’s first term, Congress impeached and convicted New Hampshire District Judge John Pickering and impeached but failed to convict Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. In each case, the articles of impeachment alleged acts that may well have amounted to misbehavior in office but that from a detached perspective do not look like high crimes or misdemeanors.
So the fact that in these circumstances Congress relied upon impeachment rather than devising some other procedure more tailored to misbehavior may suggest that, by 1803 at least, Congress regarded the Constitution as doing what we have argued it did not do—namely, conflating impeachment and the removal of judges for misbehavior.
Real Interesting Read:
As most students of constitutional law recall from studying Marbury v. Madison, in 1801 Jefferson’s Republican Party had ousted John Adams’sFederalists following a bitterly fought election,193 and before the change of administrations the Federalists had attempted to entrench their party by enacting the Judiciary Act of 1801, creating new judgeships that were hastily filled with Federalist appointees.
Understandably resentful, Jefferson launched an all-out and multifaceted assault on the judiciary. Despite Article III’s life-tenure provisions, the recent Judiciary Act was repealed and the new judgeships eliminated: Jefferson’s congressional allies explained that if the Federalist judges could not be removed from their offices, the offices would be removed from the judges. And Congress tinkered with the Supreme Court’s term, thereby preventing the Court from sitting for fourteen months.
The impeachments of Pickering and Chase (an eminent Federalist detested by the
Republicans) were the culmination of this campaign against the judiciary.
It is good we are having this conversation. Unquestionably there are numbers of zealots of a Marxist persuasion who need to be removed from public office. Finding a clear, unambiguous way to do so is vital. These judges are the first of many who must be removed from office for the good of the nation.
I have read that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase contended that the States were a creation of the Federal government.