Source: Congress.gov
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Good afternoon. The committee is called to order. Today's hearing is on impeachment, holding rogue judges accountable. The American Republic begins with a simple and radical truth. All power originates with the people. Before there is a Congress, before there is a president, before there are courts, there is the sovereign citizen. The founders placed that principle on the very first line of our national charter. We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, do ordain and establish this Constitution. They did not say we the judges, we the bureaucrats, we the elites. They said we the people. James Madison wrote in Federalist 49 that the people are the only legitimate fountain of power. Each senator in this room, every judge, every government official is merely a temporary vessel of the power vested in the citizenry. We exercise it under their watch, and when we betray that trust, the Constitution empowers the people to cast us out of the offices we hold. That principle binds Congress. established by Article I of the Constitution. Members of Congress stand for election at regular intervals so that the people may withdraw their consent if we fail to honor their trust. It binds the executive, established by Article II of the Constitution. The president, far from being a sovereign, is answerable to the electorate every four years. The people may renew his mandate or revoke it. the president can also be impeached. And this very same principle also binds the judiciary, constituted by Article III of the Constitution, but solely by the mechanism of impeachment.
Article III judges do not stand for election because the framers sought to shield judicial judgment from the temporary passions. Moreover, judges are given a generous standard of tenure not as a princely privilege, but as a sacred trust to protect impartiality, but not to countenance misconduct. Because life tenure without accountability would be tyranny. The framers provided a constitutional answer. Judges enjoy good behavior tenure enforced by Congress through impeachment. A judge who ceases to meet the standard of good behavior well ceases to hold office. As Hamilton explained in Federalist 81, impeachment, quote, is alone a complete security against the danger of judiciary encroachments and judges' misconstructions of the will of the legislature. When Hamilton identifies misconstructions of law as grounds for impeachment, He makes clear that the founders created impeachment to protect the government and the people from the wayward decisions of errant judges. But to grasp the full weight of that remedy, one must understand what the framers meant by impeachment. If impeachment were confined to ordinary crimes, it would serve merely a symbolic purpose. When a judge commits murder, or takes a bribe, or defrauds the public, he or she will be indicted, convicted, and removed by a citizen jury because a man or woman in prison cannot sit on a federal bench. If criminality were the standard, impeachment would be a merely symbolic add-on to the criminal process. The Framers rejected that narrow view. They knew that a republic requires two tribunals, one to publish crimes and another to protect the Constitution.
A jury of citizens has the power to judge crimes like theft and bribery and murder and fraud. But only the Senate, speaking for the states and for the people, can render a verdict on public officials for the sins that escape the statute book. The quiet betrayals, the abuses of power, the subtle subversions that may violate no criminal statute and yet strike at the very architecture of our republic. That's why the Constitution adopts the broader term high crimes and misdemeanors to describe the predicate offense required for impeachment. A phrase drawn from the English practice to denote breach of trust, abuse of official authority, and dereliction of constitutional duty. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 65, Impeachable offenses are those offenses that involve, quote, the abuse or violation of the public trust and injure society itself. And the historical record underscores that point. Criminal misconduct by federal judges has always been rare, bribery, perjury, fraud. In those cases, impeachment merely hastened what was already inevitable. But rarer still until now,
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