The Trump administration and some Republican senators deflected Elon Musk’s calls to impeach judges who’ve temporarily sided with challenges to halt White House initiatives that include his drive to slash the federal workforce.
“That will not happen now,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a Justice Department news conference on Wednesday. “We’re going to follow the law right now. We’re going to follow the process. These are federal judges with lifetime appointments.”
Key Senate Republicans also defended the power of the courts to rule against President Donald Trump.
“We’ve got a system of checks and balances, and that’s what I see working. I learned in 8th grade civics about checks and balances and I expect the process to work its way out,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told reporters.
Fellow Senate Judiciary member John Kennedy (R-La.) said, “I don’t agree with all the rulings. It’s often the case that I’ll disagree with an opinion that a court issues, but I don’t attack. I don’t attack, and I don’t intend to attack the legitimacy of the federal judiciary.”
Rhetoric from House Republicans is more heated with some members echoing Musk’s calls to remove judges. The billionaire businessman leading a government efficiency team under Trump said that “it’s time” for Congress to start impeaching judges, and that “the worst” 1% of appointed judges should be fired annually.
Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) said in an post on the social media site X that he would draft articles of impeachment against the primary target of Musk’s ire, US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, and added that “Partisan judges abusing their positions is a threat to democracy.”
Engelmayer, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, temporarily blocked Musk’s effort in recent days to gain access to the Treasury Department’s electronic payment system as part of his Trump-ordered push to cut the size of government.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said the decision “turns the Constitution on its head” and promised a response. “We will hold this judge, and others who try to stop the will of the people and their elected leaders, accountable,” she said.
Democrats and some legal scholars characterize the workforce downsizing, another push to close the US Agency for International Development, and other orders or steps taken by Trump since taking office as unlawful. They condemned Musk’s impeachment remarks as well as comments by Vice President JD Vance sharply criticizing Engelmayer’s order.
Removal from the bench would require two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict a judge of high crimes and misdemeanors. A judicial impeachment is exceedingly rare.
Trump Allies
Some vocal Trump Senate backers also accused courts of trampling on the rightful executive powers with injunctions.
“I went to engineering school, not to law school, but my initial read on this is this is overreach by these judges. The executive branch has every right to make some modifications to the way you manage employees of the federal government,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont).
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) defended Trump’s power as “the country’s CEO” to pursue his policy goals after “77 million people voted for him to change what we were doing.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also said on X that judges who’ve made adverse rulings against the Trump White House are “judicial insurrectionists,” and said he’s brainstorming ways for Congress to hold such judges accountable.
Appellate Role
Like Bondi, another Republican referred to the appeals process.
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) said that by viewing adverse rulings against Trump as pro-Democratic or favorable rulings as pro-Republican, “we’ve essentially conceded that there’s no such thing as objective legal analysis, and I’m not prepared to do that.”
“We have come up with no better system than to defer to judicial rulings and then to rely on our appeals courts to challenge those rulings,” Young said.
Separately, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday the administration believes the injunctions issued “by these judges” have “no basis in the law and no grounds.” Nevertheless, she said the administration would comply with the orders.
“It’s the administration’s position that we’ll ultimately be vindicated and the president’s executive actions that he took were completely within the law. They were constitutional,” she said.
Late Wednesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Trump ‘s offer for federal employees to resign voluntarily can move forward, at least temporarily clearing a path for his administration to shrink agencies. District Judge George O’Toole said unions challenging the move didn’t have standing to sue.
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