Before Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was sworn in, critics were calling for his impeachment. The political polarization over allegations that he had assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers doesn’t show much sign of abating.
Impeachment is a polarizing process itself, though, one that even many Democrats appear uneasy about pursuing if they win control of Congress in next month’s elections. Without a two-thirds majority in the Senate, impeachment would be doomed to fail, anyway. But a Democratic Congress and a future Democratic president could still remove Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court if they wanted without needing to impeach him. There are two other ways to kick a sitting justice off the court — neither of which requires a supermajority.
In the first, a new president would nominate and the Senate would confirm by majority vote a justice — in this case Kavanaugh — to a different post on an intermediate court of appeals (say the D.C. Circuit, where Kavanaugh formerly served). The justice would, in effect, be demoted.
