Chatter and sincere efforts to impeach lawfare judges handing out political favors disguised as legal rulings from their judicial throne is never going to amount to much more than fading headline news. It is time to end judicial immunity for judges.
End it through constitutional amendments, state by state, and federally by amending the U.S. Constitution. It’s not too late to listen to Thomas Jefferson.
Even if, by some miracle, Congress jumps through all the hoops to land a despotic judge in the hot seat, it still doesn’t threaten a judge’s fat paycheck and pensions. More importantly, impeachment is an empty, elusive deterrent that leaves the victims of a judge’s lawless rulings with zero recourse.
The arrest of rogue judges like Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan, who used the bench to aid and abet a criminal, was an unusual step in the right direction, but wait for it. It’s coming: She’ll wiggle out of it through the escape hatch called judicial immunity.
In other words, thanks to the shield of steel that judges gave themselves long ago, they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
If one of the illegal aliens these impervious judges are ordering to stay put or be returned to America goes off and rapes and murders someone’s daughter, the almighty judge can’t be sued because of the immunity he enjoys.
Her family would have a better chance of suing the flight attendant who helped deplane the deportees or the cop who escorted the busload of them back onto U.S. soil — just not these black-robed self-appointed gods whom we must rise to greet whenever they enter a room.
And they know it. Absolute immunity is the ultimate safety net. “Bet it all, because you won’t lose a thing” is basically what immunity says to judges.
Without consequences, the sacred checks and balances that the framers of the Constitution so carefully built into our system of government go out the window, at least when it comes to judges. The eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu, who invented the concept of “separation of powers” in his famous premonitory treatise “The Spirit of the Laws,” must be rolling in his grave.
Then came Jefferson, warning that it is a “very dangerous doctrine” to make judges “the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions.” Because it would, as he prophetically wrote back in 1820 to his pal William Charles Jarvis in his now famed Jefferson papers, “place us under the despotism of an Oligarchy.”
“Our judges are as honest as other men,” Jefferson wrote, “and not more so.” Put judicial review in the hands of Congress, he warned, or else we’ll be sorry.