Newsmax host calls for federal judges to be impeached: “You can't have people like this on the bench”

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From the February 12, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight 

ROB SCHMITT (HOST): Our legal system has so clearly been politicized at this point. It's obvious, right?

TOM FITTON (GUEST): Yeah, when you have a series of judges making extraordinary rulings that I think most would agree wouldn't have been made in similar circumstances for the president of another political party or anyone not named Trump, for that matter, you have to raise the question about whether politics is — whether politics are behind these judicial rulings or the rule of law.

You know, typically, you know, judges don't intervene, you know, in a light way, the way these judges have intervened to prevent the president from doing what presidents since the beginning of time have been able to do, which is to exercise the executive function, for instance, of firing someone or pausing funding for a minute and a half to make sure there's nothing fraudulent going on. And, you know, when you think about this as a non-lawyer, you know, one of the things that you kind of figure out when you're asking for quick action from a court is, oh, you got to act quickly because there's irreparable harm. What's the emergency here? Someone gets fired. The harm is mitigated by writing them a check. There's no irreparable harm. When funding is paused. The harm is mitigated by unpausing the funding. So there's no emergency here other than stopping Trump and stopping his momentum.

SCHMITT: Yeah.

FITTON: And to me, that's a political approach by the courts as opposed to a legal approach.

SCHMIT: Yeah. And it's stopping it, I don't know for how long because obviously I think on appeal all these disappear. There's members of Congress that want to impeach these judges. I can't think of a of a better answer than that. I mean, you can't have people like this on the bench. You just can't. I mean, this is — it's so un-American to view the law through a political lens.

FITTON: Well, you know, we haven't impeached judges since the beginning of the 1800s, and that one failed. So it's going to be a tough — that would be a tough nut to crack. What Congress can do, rather than impeaching judges, in my view, is support the president — defund these agencies, defund USAID. End it. End the Education Department. Curtail federal employment and make it quite apparent that the president has got these powers to not only offer buyouts, but eliminate the employment of many more of the two plus million bureaucrats that work for the federal government now, you know. But on the other hand, the courts are moving in Trump's direction in a key — in key areas. A — one judge lifted his injunction and, for example, and is allowing these buyouts to proceed and the deadline to reissue.

SCHMITT: It's — I mean it's the president of the United States and they're trying to clean up the government and they're facing resistance in legal form. To me, this just makes — I'm not a legal mind you, you're you're the expert at this stuff.