Far-right legal activist Mike Davis told Steve Bannon on his "War Room" show that Republican lawmakers need to start threatening judges who block President Donald Trump from carrying out his policies.
"It's really important that the House and Senate step up and rein in these activist judges who are sabotaging the president's Article II executive powers," said Davis, a former law clerk for now-Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. "They think they're the last line of resistance because they lost the election."
Some judges who have ruled against Trump, however, were appointed by Trump.
"But hang on, the left's going crazy right now or blowing up," said Bannon. "Specifically, to the best of your ability, has the head of the Judiciary Committee and the Speaker of the House committed to... I'm talking about the impeachment. Johnson, it's been reported that he doesn't want to do impeachment."
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"What we can't do is, we cannot take the impeachment probe off the table," said Davis. "That is important to have that leverage, that is important to have that Sword of Damocles over the judiciary's head ... if you don't have that leverage, you're not going to get the chief justice's attention. So you need to go after this on multiple fronts."
Davis also suggested cutting off funding for the courts, a strategy Republicans tried with the Kansas state courts in 2015 after they overruled the governor's pet legislation but swiftly backed down from as it caused a legal crisis.
All of this, he said, was necessary to make Chief Justice John Roberts "panic" and stop the judiciary from obstructing Trump.
As more and more judges have sought to rein in Trump's efforts to purge the federal civil service and dismantle agencies funded and authorized by Congress, Trump and his allies have threatened the impeachment of judges based solely on their rulings — a measure that has not been attempted since 1804.
This has prompted Roberts, a lifelong conservative who has backed Trump in a number of legal cases, to issue a rare statement defending judicial independence.
"[I]mpeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," said Roberts. "The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."
