Chief Justice John Roberts is now the target of a formal impeachment effort in the House of Representatives. On May 21, 2026, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat representing Tennessee’s 9th district, introduced six articles of impeachment against Roberts, accusing the nation’s top judge of steering the Supreme Court away from neutrality and toward open partisanship.
The resolution, filed as H.Res.1309, lays out a sweeping indictment of Roberts’ tenure. Cohen argues that under the Chief Justice’s leadership, the Court has stopped acting as a neutral arbiter and instead has functioned as an instrument of partisan power – handing major victories to the powerful while narrowing protections for ordinary Americans.
What the Resolution Actually Is
It is important to be precise about what happened here. This is an introduced resolution – a long-shot, largely symbolic move. It has not been passed by the House. There is no Senate trial underway, and no member of the Supreme Court has been removed. Under the Constitution, the House would first need to approve articles of impeachment by a majority vote, after which the Senate would hold a trial requiring a two-thirds supermajority to convict and remove.
With the current makeup of Congress, Cohen’s resolution faces almost no realistic path to advancing in the near term. No federal judge has been removed through impeachment in American history beyond a small handful of lower-court judges, and a sitting Chief Justice has never been impeached. Cohen and his allies are well aware of those odds.
Why Cohen Filed It Anyway
For Cohen, the point is less about immediate removal and more about putting a marker down. By introducing the articles, he is formally placing on the congressional record a charge that millions of Americans have been making for years: that a Court controlled by a 6-3 conservative supermajority has stopped looking like an impartial referee and started looking like a partisan actor.
Critics of the Roberts Court point to a string of decisions that have broken in the same ideological direction – from rulings that weakened federal voting-rights protections to the landmark decision expanding presidential immunity. To Cohen and his supporters, the pattern is the problem. The resolution is an attempt to force that argument into the open and to demand accountability from an institution that operates with lifetime appointments and little external check.
Roberts and the Court’s Defense
Roberts has spent much of his career insisting that the Supreme Court sits above politics. He has repeatedly pushed back on the idea that the justices are partisans in robes, famously stating that the Court does not have Republican or Democratic judges. Defenders of the Court argue that disagreeing with its rulings is not grounds for impeachment, and that using the impeachment power against justices over their legal opinions would threaten judicial independence itself.
That tension – between holding the Court accountable and preserving its independence – sits at the heart of the debate Cohen has now reignited. Supporters of the resolution counter that public confidence in the Court has fallen to historic lows, and that the institution’s own conduct, not its critics, is responsible for the erosion of trust.
What This Means for Americans
The Supreme Court touches nearly every part of daily life – voting access, healthcare, reproductive rights, the power of regulators, and the limits of presidential authority. When a growing number of lawmakers and voters no longer trust that the Court is calling balls and strikes fairly, the legitimacy of those decisions comes into question. Cohen’s resolution is unlikely to remove anyone from the bench, but it has succeeded in dragging a long-simmering argument about the Court’s credibility into the spotlight.
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