Conservative US appeals court judge knocks calls to impeach jurists

By Nate Raymond

March 28 (Reuters) - A conservative federal appeals judge who President Donald Trump considered a potential candidate for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination during his first term said impeaching judges was not the way to address court rulings with which parties disagreed.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor of the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in an podcast interview released on Thursday threw his support behind Chief U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' statement last week rebuking Trump for calling for a judge's impeachment.

"All the chief justice did, I thought modestly and appropriately, was to point out the unbroken tradition in American history that we don't impeach judges for decisions that are unpopular or that we may think are wrong or right, whatever it may be, wrong, controversial," Pryor said in an interview on Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar's podcast "America's Constitution."

Trump included Pryor, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, on a 2017 shortlist of potential nominees for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Roberts took the rare step of issuing a statement after Trump called for impeaching U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, who had blocked the Republican president from using wartime powers to deport Venezuelan migrants.

Roberts, a member of the U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority, in his statement did not name Trump but stressed that "impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision."

Pryor said "there have been calls of this kind from leaders of both political parties in recent years, but it is a little more unusual perhaps when the president, who has the executive power, says something."

He said what Roberts said in response was "modest and factual" and included the "important" point that the way to address adverse court rulings is to appeal them, not to seek the removal of federal judges from office.

"We have a remedy for correcting decisions that we may think are wrong," Pryor said. "But that process is not impeachment, it's an appeal."

Boasberg is among six federal judges who after issuing decisions blocking Trump administration initiatives have become the subject of impeachment resolutions filed in the U.S. House of Representatives by conservative allies of Trump.

Judges have also become the subject of threats as Trump, tech billionaire Elon Musk and other White House allies rail against "activist" judges who stand in the way of their efforts to slash federal jobs and programs.

Two other Republican-appointed appeals court judges, U.S. Circuit Judges Jeffrey Sutton of the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit and Richard Sullivan of the New York-based 2nd Circuit, have likewise recently expressed concerns about calls to impeach judges.

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