Republicans are talking about impeaching judges for wretched decisions.

Good! Let's impeach the Supreme Court's Felonious Five for Bush v. Gore - the most wretched decision since Plessy.

From today's First Read:

Back to all the talk of retribution against judges.  We wondered whether or not Congress actually can impeach judges over decisions it doesn't agree with.  The constitutional scholars we talked with don't think so.  Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman cites the 1804 impeachment -- and acquittal one year later -- of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who Ackerman says was accused, with some justification, of partisanship and serious judicial mistakes.  "Just making legal mistakes is not ground for impeachment," he says.  "We've had this argument before."

Ackerman adds that this doesn't mean the debate can't take place again -- but that overturning such a precedent would be "a wrench in a 200-year tradition."  (He notes that judges who commit high crimes and misdemeanors, like corruption, can be impeached.)  Rehnquist made a similar point in a 2003 speech: "The significance of the outcome of the Chase trial cannot be overstated...  [I]t represented a judgment that impeachment should not be used to remove a judge for conduct in the exercise of his judicial duties.  The political precedent set by Chase's acquittal has governed that day to this: a judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment."

Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown University, argues that there has to be some remedy or check for extreme judicial errors.  Nevertheless, he says, "We've had a number of what I think many would consider terrible decisions by the courts over the years, and you don't go running to the impeachment tool every time one of them comes to a decision you don't like."

House Judiciary Committee spokesman Jeff Lungren tells First Read that the committee's counsels "agree that we don't impeach for bad opinions."  He adds, however, that it would be wrong to think that the federal judiciary is completely independent or immune to congressional oversight -- noting that Congress sets judges' salaries, that it can impeach them for crimes and misdemeanors, and that it can pass laws switching jurisdiction from state courts to federal ones (as it did with its recent legislation regulating class-action lawsuits).