Washington Post: “A member of Congress called for the impeachment of a sitting Supreme Court justice, complaining that the justice had supported the idea that violence and rebellion against the government may be justified under some circumstances. The member noted that the code of ethics for federal judicial officers, which included the concept of recusal in the face of conflicts or the appearance of impropriety, did not apply to the Supreme Court, so that the only recourse against the justice was impeachment. This was not April 2022, but April 1970. The speaker was not Ilhan Omar, but Gerald Ford, then House minority leader and later president of the United States. And the justice in question wasn’t Clarence Thomas, but William O. Douglas, appointed to the court by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The revelation by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of text messages from Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to pursue efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has occasioned a firestorm of criticism of Justice Thomas. Many Democrats and liberal groups have demanded that Thomas, who refused to recuse himself in any of the election-related litigation, step down or be impeached. Ginni Thomas would not be the first Supreme Court spouse to imperil a justice Historians immediately searched for a parallel, with most focusing on the only impeachment of a sitting justice, in 1805. The justice was Samuel Chase, an intensely partisan opponent of President Thomas Jefferson. The House impeached him, but the Senate refused to convict and remove him. Yet this impeachment, early in the Republic, has little to teach us about the precedent of seeking to dislodge a modern Supreme Court justice. Ford’s speech on April 15, 1970, is much more instructive in understanding the dynamics that might come into play should the House take up impeachment articles against Thomas. Ford’s speech came at the beginning of an era of hyperpartisan wrangling over Supreme Court nominations. Toward the end of Lyndon B. Johnson’s term in June 1968, 77-year-old Chief Justice Earl Warren sent a letter to the president saying he would step down once his successor was confirmed. Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon’s friends in the Senate immediately vowed to fight any effort by a “lame duck” president (Johnson had announced he wouldn’t seek reelection) to appoint a new chief justice in the waning days of his administration…”