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Worldnews

US Chief Justice John Roberts Slams Trumps Call To Impeach A Federal Judge

President Donald Trump has called for the impeachment of US federal Judge James Boasberg after he ruled against a recent deportation effort. The leading authority on the United States Supreme Court has issued a rare statement rebuking US President Donald Trump for calling for a federal judge’s impeachment. On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts released two short lines, neither of which mention Trump by name. But his message was clear: Threatening a federal judge with impeachment is not acceptable. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” the statement read. Roberts’s remarks arrived within hours of Trump’s own social media missive, wherein he blasted Judge James E Boasberg, who serves in the federal district court in Washington, DC. “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post that seemed to argue that presidential authority superseded judicial power. “He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE.” Boasberg recently ordered the Trump administration to halt deportations made under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows wartime presidents to detain and deport foreign nationals from a “hostile nation”. The act had only been used three times before and only during war, the last instance being the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans and foreign nationals during World War II. But the Trump administration proceeded with deportations under the act on Saturday evening, leading some to speculate it had openly violated Boasberg’s orders. Boasberg himself has not yet ruled whether the Trump administration disobeyed the court’s orders. But he has called for lawyers from the US Department of Justice to deliver a timeline of when the deportation flights took off, as well as other information about the events of Saturday night. Trump, however, called for Boasberg — who has been appointed to various positions in the justice system by Republican and Democratic presidents — to be removed from his post. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote on Tuesday morning. Congress does indeed have the power to impeach federal judges, though such instances are rare. The last federal judge to be impeached was G Thomas Porteous, who served in the eastern district of Louisiana: He was accused of accepting bribes and issuing false statements, leading to his removal from office in 2010. This is not the first time Trump has made such a threat, though. In November 2023, for instance, as he faced a civil investigation into alleged fraud at the Trump Organization, Trump called for the impeachment of both the judge in the case and the lead prosecutor. “Judge [Arthur] Engoron and Letitia James should be impeached and removed from office for fraudulently reducing my Asset Values, by many times, in order to hurt and demean me,” he wrote. But since returning to office for a second term on January 20, Trump has faced a litany of legal challenges to many of his controversial policy changes. Republicans have lined up behind him, echoing his criticisms of various judges as biased and corrupt. Boasberg’s order on Saturday has spurred a new wave of such rhetoric, with several right-wing lawmakers calling for his removal. “Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country. This time to benefit foreign gang members,” Senator Chuck Grassley wrote on social media. Representative Brandon Gill, meanwhile, said he had filed articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives against the “radical activist” Boasberg. “He is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office,” Gill posted on his social media on Tuesday. Even Elon Musk, a donor to Trump’s re-election campaign and a White House adviser, weighed in on Monday. “The very worst judges – those who repeatedly flout the law – should at least be put to an impeachment vote, whether that vote succeeds or not,” Musk said on his social media platform X. But Chief Justice Roberts has long defended the court system against such pressure. Last year, in his year-end report, Roberts similarly denounced attempts by lawmakers to push for impeachment on political grounds. “Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote. “Within the past year we also have seen the need for state and federal bar associations to come to the defense of a federal district judge whose decisions in a high-profile case prompted an elected official to call for her impeachment. Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.” The American Bar Association has likewise noted the trend as Trump’s second term unfolds. “There have been calls to impeach ‘corrupt judges’ with no effort to produce evidence of the so called ‘corruption’,” the association wrote in a statement on March 3. “These have been directed only at judges who have ruled against the government position.” Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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Worldnews

Israel Resumes Its War On Us, The People Of Gaza

Maram Humaid writes about her family trying to come to grips with the nightmare of Israel restarting its war on Gaza. Deir el-Balah, Gaza – It wasn’t a nightmare, it was real. The war had returned, just like that, without warning. The clock read 2:10am when we woke up in terror to the deafening sound of air strikes. A violent noise shook everything around us. My daughter, Banias, woke up screaming in fear: “Baba! Mama! What’s happening?” She was right next to me, crying out in terror, but I couldn’t even reassure her. My mind was in complete chaos. Is this bombing again? What’s happening? Who’s attacking us? In a moment of denial, I thought: are these Yemeni missiles on Israel? Is this strike hitting us? Oh my God. The explosions intensified, and the sound was unmistakable, one we knew too well – Israeli air strikes on Gaza. My husband held Banias, trying to calm her down. I ran to my phone, scrolling through local journalist groups. Everyone was asking: “What’s happening?” Minutes passed before the news started rolling in: a house targeted in Deir el-Balah, a strike on a home in Nuseirat. Several tents for displaced families were bombed in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, and there was artillery shelling in Rafah. An entire residential building was hit in Jabalia, northern Gaza, and there were strikes in the al-Karama neighbourhood. A “belt of fire” unleashed on central Gaza. Then came the desperate pleas: “A family’s trapped under the rubble.” “A residential block has been levelled.” “We need ambulances.” People screamed for help, calling for civil defence teams. And still, the bombing continued – violent, relentless. Photos and videos flooded in – shattered bodies, martyrs, the wounded filling every functioning medical centre in the Strip. Scenes that we had barely begun to forget, returned. Moments later, Israel officially announced it was abrogating the ceasefire and resuming its war on Gaza. It felt like a blow to the head. “What does this mean?” my sister, who had come to spend a few days with me, cried out. “No, God, no! We don’t want war again. We don’t want the bombing, the fear.” We all stared at the news, eyes wide with shock. “Oh God, enough … enough.” Still clutching my phone, I scrolled further – images of infants killed in the air strikes, burning tents, entire residential blocks reduced to rubble. Oh God, the same images, the same suffering, the same nightmare. War was picking up exactly where it had left off – without embellishment, without pretence, without disguise. Just killing, bombing, extermination and an endless flood of blood. My family around me asked, “What about the north? Will they close the road between north and south again?” We were trapped. Just last night, I invited my father and my twin sisters, both in their 20s, for a Ramadan iftar at our place in al-Zawayda, near Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. It was a simple family gathering, and I convinced them to stay the night, planning for us all to head north the next morning. We had planned a few Ramadan visits, and some errands to buy clothes for the children before Eid and summer arrived. As always, every visit to the north was also an opportunity to explore new stories. Now, all those “plans” were meaningless. In a single moment, life had flipped upside down. The war was back. Planning has become a crime in this place. To plan for your day, no matter how mundane, even something as simple as shopping or spending time with family is an unforgivable luxury. Here, you are guilty for expecting normalcy, you’re condemned to live in a constant state of alert – every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every year. My sister, who works in media for a humanitarian organisation, suddenly realised: “Oh God! I didn’t bring my laptop or my things! What do I do now?” Guilt consumed me. I was the one who convinced them to stay, this was my fault. What if they close the roads? What will the next phase of the war look like? Will the war start in the north? Or will they invade the central area? There is only Deir el-Balah left now. Oh God, what kind of trap is this? My mind spiralled, flipping through thoughts – would we have to wear our protective press vests again? Go back to working from hospitals? But we had already dismantled our tent workspace there. Journalists had withdrawn, scattered between north and south, trying to start over. Wait, what about Banias’s school? I had just registered her in a school last week, surely that was over now. We were back to war. My heart ached. When the ceasefire began, we felt some relief, but never safety. Fear, hesitation and confusion clung to us. We didn’t know where to start, we didn’t dare to plan and every time we did, the missiles reminded us of our mistake. Two days ago, my husband and I went shopping and for the first time, I dared to buy a single rug, a table and chairs, plates and spoons, and a few kitchen essentials. Since moving here, all we had were four mattresses, four blankets, four plates, four spoons and a small pot for cooking. Throughout the war, we refused to get anything else. Our clothes were stacked on a sheet spread on the floor in a designated room, divided into sections for each of us, we jokingly called it “the dressing room”. It was always a mess, organising the clothes on the floor was a daily battle and every time we stepped into the room, my husband and I would say: “We need a closet.” A closet was a grand luxury, it took a ceasefire for us to even think about buying one, although we were hesitating over whether to stay in the south or move north. We always chose to travel light, ready to flee at any moment. But just yesterday morning, I finally packed away our winter clothes and told my husband: “Let’s buy a closet.” Now I had my answer. This renewed bombing meant that the closet was no longer an option, chaos awaited instead … the chaos of my thoughts, my shattered plans, the chaos of a life I could no longer control, no matter how hard I tried. And despite all the destruction and ruin around us, as if it wasn’t already enough, we know we can no longer dream, no longer plan, no longer wish for anything, no longer look forward to anything. All we want is do to survive. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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