The federal judiciary is running a protection racket for its own judges.
Three cases broke into public view this week, and they document a single pattern repeated across three separate circuits. In Georgia, U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross faces articles of impeachment after a judicial council privately reprimanded her for having sex in her chambers with a high-ranking police officer during business hours, while law clerks could hear, and then lying about it to investigators. In Idaho, Ninth Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson was criminally charged after a parking-lot confrontation, captured on video, in which he allegedly grabbed a motorist’s glasses and stomped on them—an incident that went undisclosed for months while Nelson continued to hear cases. In Michigan, District Judge Thomas Ludington pleaded not guilty to violating his probation, which he is serving after a conviction for driving under the influence, because he allegedly skipped required alcohol testing.
The structural defense of the judicial disciplinary system is judicial independence. The constitutional separation of powers insulates Article III judges from executive-branch harassment and legislative retaliation. The Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 delegates the initial review of ethical lapses to internal judicial councils, deliberately shielding the federal courts from the political weaponization of the impeachment process. Retired Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Wood, writing in Bloomberg Law, argues that the system works well and that she sees “nothing here that casts doubt on the genuineness or integrity of the decisions the Committee made.” The steel-man version of the system is that judges who stray are investigated by their peers, disciplined proportionately, and the process is protected from the political pressures that would distort an independent judiciary.
The record tells a different story. The constitutional architecture of judicial independence was never designed to license a secret adjudicatory loop. The Judicial Conduct and Disability Act delegates review to internal councils, but § 372(c)(15) mandates that all proceedings remain presumptively confidential unless the council affirmatively votes to release them. This statutory default operates as a mechanical shield: it prevents public naming, which in turn severs the political accountability that normally disciplines an independent branch. The result is a closed administrative circuit where the same councils that value judicial repute above individual complaint control the evidence, the narrative, and the outcome. Gabe Roth of Fix the Court says flatly, “This is a classic case of judges protecting other judges.” The system’s defenders reply that the committees work and that the public simply does not see the full record. That reply is the system’s own indictment: judges have built a discipline apparatus whose chief design feature is that nobody outside it can verify whether it works.
The Ross prosecution is the architecture working exactly as designed. The judicial council that handled her case issued a private reprimand and required nothing more than apologies to six law clerks and an agreement never to serve as chief judge. The underlying conduct and the false statements to investigators are processed through an opaque, sealed mechanism rather than through the standard workplace-accountability or criminal-justice protocols that govern every other tier of the federal workforce. When MSI reported the details of the secret punishment, the council’s order described conduct that would be a firing offense in any other workplace. Aliza Shatzman, who runs the Legal Accountability Project, calls the outcome what it is: “a slap on the wrist in the federal judiciary, where judges are inexplicably exempt from the anti-harassment laws they interpret.” Ross remains on the bench, drawing a lifetime salary regardless of the internal file.
The pattern recurs. The Alaska case of Judge Joshua Kindred mirrors Ross’s—sexual conduct with a former clerk, lies to investigators—and there the outcome was resignation. The difference is that Kindred’s case became fully public, and his career was destroyed by the exposure, not by the judiciary’s internal discipline. Michael Fragoso of the Ethics and Public Policy Center calls the disparity “baffling.” The variable that determines the punishment is not the severity of the conduct but whether the public ever learns about it.
The substitution test confirms the regime. Substitute the names of Judges Ross, Nelson, and Ludington with any other sitting Article III judge, and the internal disciplinary apparatus yields the identical result. A sealed reprimand. A delayed investigation. A closed-file inquiry initiated only when external reporting forces the council’s hand. The Ninth Circuit disclosed its investigation of Judge Nelson only after a reporter obtained the video. The Sixth Circuit, which has authority over Judge Ludington’s fitness, declined to comment. These are not isolated jurisdictional quirks; they are the same opacity mechanism operating in different courthouses—internal misconduct proceedings that default to non-disclosure until external pressure forces a public order.
The constitutional impeachment power under Article II, Section 4 remains nominally available to Congress, but the political threshold is effectively a null mechanism. Only fifteen federal judges have been impeached in American history, and merely eight removed. The Georgia impeachment effort against Ross, led by Representatives Andrew Clyde and Clay Fuller, adds a political dimension. The articles include the allegation that Ross attended a political event hosted by the campaign of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a fact the Department of Justice has already cited in asking Ross to recuse herself from an election-records case. The impeachment push is plainly partisan, but the underlying facts driving it—the perjured statements to investigators, the secret reprimand for workplace sexual activity—are non-partisan accountability triggers. The political framing is not a distraction from the internal system’s failure; it is a symptom of it. When judges protect other judges, external political intervention becomes the only remaining lever, and the result looks like partisan score-settling even when the facts are straightforward. A judge who cannot be trusted to tell the truth to investigators and who attends political events hosted by a prosecutor with active matters before her court has forfeited the appearance of impartiality.
The failure extends beyond criminal conduct into the daily exploitation of the court’s own labor force. The judiciary’s internal disciplinary architecture has consistently insulated judges who harass, intimidate, or psychologically abuse their law clerks, because the clerkship possesses no independent whistleblower infrastructure and the judges review their own conduct. When Judge Ross allegedly lied to investigators to cover up her conduct, the judicial council processed the deception internally, rewarding the concealment with a sealed file and a quiet apology to the clerks who witnessed it. The clerks accepted the apology. The judge remains on the bench.
The Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires judges to “avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities.” The standard is absolute. The application is entirely structural. For the Article III judiciary, the mechanism is self-administered, structurally opaque, and insulated from immediate consequence. The system treats its own lifetime appointees as a constitutionally privileged class, exempt from the workplace conduct standards they routinely enforce in the employment-litigation, civil-rights, and criminal dockets before them.
What an honest disciplinary regime would require is not mysterious. Investigations would be made public at their conclusion, with findings and reasoning stated on the record. Sanctions would be proportionate to the conduct, and the standard for removal would not be a rarity that has befallen only eight federal judges in the nation’s history. The judiciary would treat its own members the way they treat every other licensed professional brought before them. The committees would not be populated almost exclusively by other judges, whose institutional interest is in keeping the club’s reputation intact.
The system does not reform itself because it has no incentive to. Congress must amend the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act to strip judicial councils of their unilateral secrecy powers and install an external inspector general with independent subpoena authority, or the courts will permanently remain a constitutionally unaccountable estate. Until Congress acts, the pattern will hold: private reprimands for public misconduct, secrecy as the default, and a self-policing apparatus that protects judges from the very accountability they impose on everyone else.