Civics: “The impeachment rate now seems implausibly low”
Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments.
What is the probability we’d observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it’s somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it’s very fishy.
What’s even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this.
The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.
Then in 2008 the federal judges “reformed” themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue.
