The chief justice’s public rebuke of President Trump is a remarkable and inadvisable intrusion into what is, as Andy has written extensively, a purely political exercise.
The chief is no doubt correct that impeachment should not be used to punish a judge for a decision, even an incorrect one. But that is a prudential, political judgment, not a legal question, and the judicial branch has very little, if any, role in policing those political judgments.
The rebuke is inadvisable for another, even weightier reason. It is quite possible that the president’s alleged noncompliance with Judge Boasberg’s order to turn planes around could become evidence in a future, Democrat-led impeachment trial of Donald Trump, should the Democrats retake control of the House and follow through on their perpetual impeachment threats. And if they do so, the chief justice would preside over any impeachment trial in the Senate. The chief justice has just given the president and the country a basis to doubt his impartiality in such a hypothetical impeachment proceeding, should the Boasberg episode form a basis for a future article of impeachment.
Maybe all of that is too speculative to consider truly probable — but it is within the realm of political possibility, enough so that the better course would have been to stand down from publicly correcting the president.