This isn’t the first time Chief Justice Roberts took on President Trump. (And he’s been wrong each time)

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Federal judges are not supposed to criticize the President of the United States other than in official opinions deciding cases in which the President is a party. The late-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg apologized in 2016 for responding to a media inquiry by criticizing the then-presumptive Republican nominee for President, Donald Trump. She nevertheless criticized Trump again a short time later, and both the New York Times and the Washington Post—hardly pro-Trump media outlets—chastised her for it. The Times said that Trump, who had rebuked Ginsburg for what she had said, was "right" and that Ginsburg should "drop the political punditry and the name-calling." The Post called Ginsburg’s comments "inappropriate."

Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts disagrees. After all, he recently criticized President Trump in the media for a third time. Roberts first criticized Trump in 2018 when the President said that an "Obama judge" often decides cases differently than a Republican judge. According to Roberts, the political party affiliation of a judge does not matter. With all due respect, the Chief Justice is incorrect. Indeed, the first question that every litigator asks is, who is the judge? "Obama judges" are different from "Trump judges," and judges nominated by Kamala Harris would have been different from Trump judges too.

Six years later, on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration, Roberts raised concerns that the President might "disregard … federal court rulings." The Chief Justice called that possibility "dangerous" and said it "must be soundly rejected." What Roberts failed to mention was that other presidents have disregarded federal court rulings when they felt their constitutional oath mandated that they do so. To mention the most dramatic illustration in American history, President Andrew Jackson responded to the Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. Georgia by saying that "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."

Roberts’ third public criticism of Trump came earlier this week when the Chief Justice issued a statement in response to the President’s call for a federal judge’s impeachment because of his handling of an Alien and Sedition Act case. "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision," Roberts wrote. "The normal appellate review process exists for that reason."

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Roberts’ most recent criticism of Trump is perhaps the most troubling of all. The Constitution makes clear that Congress must occasionally exercise the political courage necessary to perform its constitutional duty of impeaching federal judges who seek to rewrite the law rather than interpret it. Alexander Hamilton advised in The Federalist Papers that impeachment is a "complete security" against the "deliberate usurpations" of a federal judge, an unmistakable indication that the Framers expected the impeachment power to be more frequently invoked than it actually has been.

Scott Douglas Gerber is the author of, among other books, "A Distinct Judicial Power: The Origins of an Independent Judiciary, 1606-1787" (Oxford University Press).