Should We Impeach Earl Warren?

Earl Warren, by any dispassionate view of the record, is a bad Chief Justice. His leading opinions are models of juridical sloth and political tendentiousness. His administration of the federal judiciary, through ambiguous rulings and denials of review, has left large areas of the law in uncertainty and confusion. The bench over which he presides has made a mockery of the Supreme Court’s appointed function of impartially expounding the Constitution and the laws, and has become the partisan agent of a fashionable ideology, set on accomplishing by judicial edict what the ideologues could not achieve through legitimate political channels. Moreover, such impulses of restraint as occasionally move the Warren Court have invariably been displayed over the Chief Justice’s vigorous dissent. . . . So: the repudiation of Earl Warren and his works is a proper concern of good citizenship.

With the relevant premises thus in faultless array, members of the John Birch Society are being urged to come forward with the demand that Warren be impeached. The answer is not that such a campaign is futile, that its opponents are much too powerful to permit the question even to be opened in the House of Representatives: its proponents know this, and reply that successful political action does not necessarily require achievement of a stated goal. Mere dramatization of the issue, they say, may mean progress; and in any event the campaign will furnish salutary evidence that defenders of the Constitutional order are still around.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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Impeachment

Earl Warren, by any dispassionate view of the record, is a bad Chief Justice. His leading opinions are models of juridical sloth and political tendentiousness. His administration of the federal judiciary, through ambiguous rulings and denials of review, has left large areas of the law in uncertainty and confusion. The bench over which he presides has made a mockery of the Supreme Court’s appointed function of impartially expounding the Constitution and the laws, and has become the partisan agent of a fashionable ideology, set on accomplishing by judicial edict what the ideologues could not achieve through legitimate political channels. Moreover, such impulses of restraint as occasionally move the Warren Court have invariably been displayed over the Chief Justice’s vigorous dissent. . . . So: the repudiation of Earl Warren and his works is a proper concern of good citizenship.

With the relevant premises thus in faultless array, members of the John Birch Society are being urged to come forward with the demand that Warren be impeached. The answer is not that such a campaign is futile, that its opponents are much too powerful to permit the question even to be opened in the House of Representatives: its proponents know this, and reply that successful political action does not necessarily require achievement of a stated goal. Mere dramatization of the issue, they say, may mean progress; and in any event the campaign will furnish salutary evidence that defenders of the Constitutional order are still around.