Just a reminder folks, this is factual questions. I don’t want anybody to get a warning so please keep it factual.
Suppose a justice perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings, but this was only discovered after they were confirmed. Can they be removed by impeachment?
If a candidate judge says during their confirmation hearing on a controversial issue that they will be ruling in manner X because for example it is settled law, but then turn around and rule Y once they are on the SCOTUS stating that it is not settled law and the original ruling was flawed, does this constitute perjury?
The answer is always yes (it’s a purely political question), but it’s especially yes here: Three federal officials have been impeached for perjury, and two of them (both federal judges) were removed from office for it.
Impeachment is a political process; a SCOTUS justice can be removed under essentially any justification that the Congress gave. It requires a majority vote in the House and a supermajority vote in the U.S. Senate.
Only a few Federal judges have ever been successfully impeached and removed, mostly for various types of fraud / financial corruption crimes. Only one Supreme Court Justice has faced impeachment (Samuel Chase), he was acquitted in the Senate. A few more judges resigned in the face of a likely conviction.
Sure, so long as you can get a majority of the House of Representatives and a supermajority of Senators to go along with it.
It’s a bit hard to say that someone perjured themself by not following through on what they said. If you say that you will take out the trash on Thursday, but don’t, then it’s not really perjury.
How it plays out is going to be much more of a political question than a legal one.
No, it was for more typical stuff (the two judges who were removed for perjury were accused of lying in the course of corruption investigations).
Speaking as hypothetically as I can, judicial nominees tend to give answers with very little factual content to the types of questions you’re asking about. I don’t think I’ve ever known a nominee to say they “will be ruling” a certain way, for example. Sometimes they do have to give factual answers, but it’s usually to questions about past conduct, such as about actions they took in a prior job.
It’s not perjury regardless. “I will not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.” “I used to think that way, but I changed my mind after listening to arguments and reading the briefs.”
I would assume most supreme court justice candidates know the law well enough to avoid any charge of perjury. But as noted already, it simply requires a vote of the congress to impeach and remove a justice from office no matter what the facts are.
Impeachment can and often is a political tool unless the (alleged) offense is so obviously bad that neither party supports it. If one party is determined to look the other way, then the senate will not convict since you need 67 senators - even if it was insert egregious act here. Conversely, if the senate thinks it has those votes, or wants to put the other party on the spot to state their position (“Do you really support X after what he did??”) then the house could vote to impeach someone for a totally imaginary crime. Both scenarios have happened. IIRC the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was based on whatever excuse they could come up with, simply because of politics. (and almost succeeded).
Perjury is a simple criminal offense. If a person lied under oath, and it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and a jury will agree to that, then the person goes to jail - judge or not, SCOTUS or not. I assume a Supreme can’t do their job from jail, unless the prison system is willing to set up a Zoom link? And when they get out, they are back on the bench unless they have the decency to resign?
But as others point out, swearing “I won’t overturn Roe” and then later doing so is not necessarily perjury. After all, their entire job is to listen to the facts and come to a fresh decision. who’s to say they didn’t? OTOH, if they swear “I did not commit sexual assault” and it can be proven they did - beyond a reasonable doubt - then they can be convicted of perjury. Perjury requires a much higher bar than he-said-she-said.
But then the same applies to bribery, sexual assault, and assorted other crimes.
And, that depends whether the senate hearings for nominees are strictly under oath. It seems to me it’s more of a job interview than a legal investigation.
And, as others have mentioned, none of them would ever state something as direct as “I swear I won’t overturn Roe”. It’d be something like “I would evaluate every case on its merits, while respecting the principle of Stare Decisis”.
Sure they could be removed for lying, it’s just a matter of whether they would. As it stands, there’s no way you’d get 2/3 of the Senate to kick them out of office. Perhaps not a single Republican senator would vote in favor of it.
Same issue. Even if a GOP-controlled House voted to impeach, unless a massive swing in voting led to the GOP also having a 2/3 majority in the Senate, the only way a vote to remove from office would likely pass is if that hypothetical liberal Justice had engaged in something blatantly corrupt.
They would, but the Democrats would balk at impeaching and removing.
The lone exception would be if a president of the same party is in power and would nominate a justice that’s equally satisfactory. Then we might see that happen. Republicans would be okay with impeaching a conservative justice as long as he’s replaced by someone equally right-wing; ditto for Democrats but the opposite way. They might even see it as an improvement, especially if it replaces an old guy with a young guy.
But for something like saying “Roe is settled law” during the confirmation hearings but then doing a 180 once actually in power? No, that wouldn’t cross the threshold.
