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Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Wednesday called on Congress during a Senate hearing to impeach two federal judges, making his most elaborate case yet for imposing the extraordinary sanction on a pair of closely scrutinized jurists.
Cruz acknowledged that impeaching federal judges is exceedingly rare — 15 have been impeached in history, typically for straightforward crimes like bribery — but the Texas Republican argued it was warranted for Judges James Boasberg and Deborah Boardman.
“Rarer still, until now, were the deeper offenses the framers feared most, judges who, without necessarily breaking a criminal statute, violate the public trust, subvert the constitutional order or wield their office in ways that injure society itself,” Cruz said. “That is why, throughout history, Congress recognized that impeachable misconduct need not be criminal.”
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U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 30, 2025. (REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein)
Cruz, a House Judiciary Committee member with an extensive legal background, said the House needed to initiate impeachment proceedings over controversial gag orders Boasberg signed in 2023 and a sentence Boardman handed down last year in the case of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s attempted assassin.
Impeachment proceedings must be initiated in the House and typically run through the House Judiciary Committee.
Russell Dye, a spokesman for the GOP-led committee, said “everything is on the table” when asked if Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was open to the idea. If the House were to vote in favor of impeachment, it would then advance to the Senate. Two-thirds of senators would need to vote to convict the judges and remove them, a highly improbable scenario because the vote would require some support from Democrats.
Cruz’s counterpart at the…
