The congressman says U.S. District Judge Amir Ali is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) has filed an article of impeachment against the federal judge who temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s suspension of all foreign aid amid pending litigation.
The impeachment
resolution, filed on Feb. 27, seeks U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s removal from office for contradicting President Donald Trump’s executive order titled Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.
On his first day in office, Trump
ordered a 90-day pause on all new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds to foreign countries. Stop-work orders have since been issued for existing awards as well, pending review by administration officials as they seek to root out government waste and fraud at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department.
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Journalism Development Network—both nonprofit USAID grant recipients—filed a lawsuit challenging the order and asked the judge to halt its enforcement.
Ali issued a temporary order directing the USAID and the State Department to restore funding for contracts that predated the president’s Jan. 20 order. The administration did not immediately comply, prompting the judge to set a deadline of midnight on Feb. 26 for the payments to resume—which was later
canceled by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ogles’s resolution contends that, in issuing those orders, the judge engaged in conduct “so utterly lacking in intellectual honesty and basic integrity that he is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The congressman argued that Ali “without merit marginalized the President’s Article II authority, which vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States.” Ogles also charged the judge with compromising Trump’s “fiduciary obligation to review federal agencies and programs.”
Ali did not return The Epoch Times’ request for comment by publication time.
The resolution is the second Ogles has introduced this week calling for the impeachment of a federal judge. Earlier in the week, he
filed articles of impeachment against District Judge John Bates for temporarily ordering the restoration of webpages containing references to gender and sexual orientation that Trump administration officials had taken down.
“At no point in American history has the judiciary considered the surgical or chemical castration of healthy children to be a compelling or even legitimate health concern and it shouldn’t start now,” Ogles
wrote in a social media post on X, calling Bates’s order “appalling.”
Ogles is not the only congressman seeking to oust judges who have contradicted the president’s policies. Reps. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) have likewise introduced articles of impeachment against District Judges Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York and John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island.
“Under Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to impeach and convict federal officials,” Crane noted in a social media post on X.
He said he appreciated his fellow lawmakers’ use of “every tool at their disposal to combat judicial overreach,” adding, “We won’t win many battles by waiting on others to take action.”
Jacob Burg contributed to this report.
