House Democrats who spoke to TPM on Tuesday were stunned and floored by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) raising the possibility of Congress eliminating some federal courts as part of House Republicans’ ongoing interest in punishing judges who dare to rule against the Trump administration.
“That is outrageous,” House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told TPM in response to Johnson’s remarks Tuesday. Johnson indicated during his weekly press conference on Tuesday that Republicans could choose to “eliminate an entire district court” if they don’t like the decisions a judge makes.
“The proper response to disagreement with a particular court ruling is not to abolish the court. That’s obviously a naked assault on judicial independence,” Raskin continued.
Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu (D-CA) also described the Speaker’s remarks as “outrageous.”
Lieu, also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told TPM that the United States is a democracy because the judiciary is “the branch of the government that tells us when a law has been violated.”
“For Republicans to want to get rid of judicial district courts, it’s just completely outrageous,” he added. “It’s also not going to happen. It’s just stupid fantasies that they have.”
Raskin was a bit more wary of how far such talk could actually go in the 119th Congress.
“I would not say that anything is impossible these days,” the Maryland Democrat said, adding that he “can’t speak for what’s going on in” the House Republican conference. “They seem to follow whatever Donald Trump is saying. So if Trump is talking about not just impeaching judges, but abolishing courts, then I’m afraid a lot of my Republican colleagues will follow along like lemmings.”
On a technical level, Congress does have the power to change the size of the judiciary, Raskin added.
“The Supreme Court exists as a constitutional matter, but the lower courts are created by Congress, so Congress can enlarge and shrink the judiciary,” he said.
When asked about the consequences of such an action — if it were to happen — Lieu, matter of factly, said: “We would instantly become an authoritarian country.”
The bafflement from the House Judiciary Democrats comes after Johnson spoke candidly to reporters about House Republicans’ options for acting on Trump’s judiciary grievances Tuesday. Several members of the House Republican conference have floated various actions they want to take to rein in federal judges who have angered Trump by blocking some of his administration’s most lawless executive actions in recent weeks.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” Johnson told reporters during a press conference. “But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”
Johnson later attempted to walk back his comments, saying that he was making a point about Congress’ “broad authority” over the “creation, maintenance and the governance” of the courts.
“I’m trying to illustrate we have a broad scope of authority over the courts,” Johnson said, according to Punchbowl News.
At least one Senate Republican threw cold water on Johnson’s suggestion Tuesday.
“My concern with doing that is that you create — unless you add in another district court somewhere else — you’re going to create massive, massive backlogs,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters on Tuesday when asked about the Speaker’s remarks. “My view is … I’d like to get more Republican judges on the bench. I mean, if we take away seats, we can’t do that.”
The unprecedented suggestion from the Speaker comes as some of Trump’s most extreme executive actions take hits from the courts. Most notably, the Trump administration is casting its ire toward U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who issued a temporary ruling blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act — an order that the administration appears to have defied.
Trump and his MAGA allies have been calling for federal judges, including Boasberg, to be impeached, but House and Senate GOP leadership is, so far, staying away from that option as they seemingly don’t have the votes for it.
As an alternative, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) indicated he is planning to speak with members of the House Appropriations Committee about the funding for the judicial branch.
“We got money, spending, the appropriations process to help try to address some of this,” Jordan said, according to NBC News.
Jordan plans to hold a hearing early next week focused on what Republicans are claiming are “abuses” of judicial authority — a show hearing that may buy leadership time while it decides how to address Trump’s calls for impeachment.
"…will follow along like lemons.” Come on folks. It’s “lemmings.” Copy editing, please!
1 / Every day and in every way Johnson proves himself an Oath Breaker to the Constitution.
2 / He sold his soul to the Devil in the form of Trump and Xtian Nationalism.
3 / If you want to sleep at night, you have to forget that he is second-in-line to the Presidency if Trump and Vance die of a bird flu outbreak or the brain worm that destroyed RFK Jr’s heroin-saturated gray matter.
Hey, when life hands you lemmings, you make lemmingaide…
What we are hearing is the Trump “dangle” style being expanded into the routine dialogue of the GOP right wing legislators: make an outrageous claim for authority, something that is a ridiculous claim for expanding their power, then assess the reactions that come in. Once the claim is on the record, it can be propagandized over time until it is normalized and treated as legitimate dialog. At some point, the claim becomes the basis of a formal proposal.
That’s one of the reason the GOP owns Fox.
Hawley’s and Jordan’s suggestions are no less outrageous then Johnson’s