Cruz, Ted: The committee is called to order. Today's hearing is on impeachment, holding rogue judges accountable. The American republic begins with a simple and radical truth. All power originates with the people. Before there is a Congress, before there is a president, before there are courts, there is the sovereign citizen. The founders placed that principle on the very first line of our national charter. We, the people, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, do ordain and establish this Constitution. They did not say we the judges, we the bureaucrats, we the elites. They said we the people. James Madison wrote in Federalist 49 that the people are the only legitimate fountain of power. Each senator in this room, every judge, every government official is merely a temporary vessel of the power vested in the citizenry. We exercise it under their watch, and when we betray that trust, the Constitution empowers the people to cast us out of the offices we hold. That principle binds Congress, established by Article I of the Constitution. Members of Congress stand for election at regular intervals so that the people may withdraw their consent if we fail to honor their trust. It binds the executive, established by Article II of the Constitution. The president, far from being a sovereign, is answerable to the electorate every four years. The people may renew his mandate or revoke it. The president can also be impeached. And this very same principle also binds the judiciary, constituted by Article III of the Constitution, but solely by the mechanism of impeachment. Article III judges do not stand for election because the framers sought to shield judicial judgment from the temporary passions. Moreover, judges are given a generous standard of tenure, not as a princely privilege, but as a sacred trust, to protect impartiality, but not to countenance misconduct. Because life tenure without accountability would be tyranny. The framers provided a constitutional answer. Judges enjoy good behavior tenure, enforced by Congress through impeachment. A judge who ceases to meet the standard of good behavior well ceases to hold office. As Hamilton explained in Federalist 81, impeachment, quote, is alone a complete security against the danger of judiciary encroachments and judges' misconstructions of the will of the legislature. When Hamilton identifies misconstructions of law as grounds for impeachment, he makes clear that the founders created impeachment to protect the government and the people from the wayward decisions of errant judges. But to grasp the full weight of that remedy, one must understand what the framers meant by impeachment. If impeachment were confined to ordinary crimes, it would serve merely a symbolic purpose. When a judge commits murder, or takes a bribe, or defrauds the public, he or she will be indicted, convicted, and removed by a citizen jury, because a man or woman in prison cannot sit on a federal bench. If criminality were the standard, impeachment would be a merely symbolic add-on to the criminal process. The framers rejected that narrow view. They knew that a republic requires two tribunals, one to publish crimes and another to protect the Constitution. A jury of citizens has the power to judge crimes like theft and bribery and murder and fraud, but only the Senate, speaking for the states and for the people, can render a verdict on public officials for the sins that escape the statute book, the quiet betrayals, the abuses of power, the subtle subversions that may violate no criminal statute and yet strike at the very architecture of our republic. That's why the Constitution adopts the broader term high crimes and misdemeanors to describe the predicate offense required for impeachment, a phrase drawn from the English practice to denote breach of trust, abuse of official authority, and dereliction of constitutional duty. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 65, impeachable offenses are those offenses that involve, quote, the abuse or violation of the public trust and injure society itself. And the historical record underscores that point. Criminal misconduct by federal judges has always been rare, bribery, perjury, fraud. In those cases, impeachment merely hastened what was already inevitable. But rarer still, until now, were the deeper offenses the framers feared most. Judges who, without necessarily breaking a criminal statute, violate the public trust, subvert the constitutional order, or wield their office in ways that injure society itself. That is why, throughout history, Congress recognized that impeachable misconduct need not be criminal. In 1803, Judge John Pickering was removed for drunkenness, mental deterioration, and unlawful rulings, conduct that rendered him incapable of faithful service. In 1936, Judge Halstead Ritter was convicted for behavior that brought his court, quote, into scandal and disrepute. These cases are rare, but today, the same category of constitutional injury is before us again in the matter of two federal judges. Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the District Court for the District of Columbia and Judge Deborah L. Boardman of the District Court for the District of Maryland. Judge Boasberg used the authority of his office to authorize and then to conceal targeting members of Congress, spying on the legislative branch, and striking at the very heart of the Constitutional Speech and Debate Clause. No republic can survive if its judges help opposition officials surveil the people's elected representatives. In his own words, Judge Boasberg claimed that he, quote, finds reasonable grounds to believe that such disclosure will result in the destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation. Now about whom is he speaking? Judge Boasberg signed that order concerning nearly 20% of the Republicans in the United States Senate. He made a judicial finding that multiple members of this committee, quote, will result in the destruction or tampering of evidence. What basis did he have for that? He pointed to no evidence. The subpoenas were kept hidden from us, contrary to law, in violation of 2 U.S.C. section 6628, which was enacted back in 2004, had been the law for 20 years. And we must view these in context. Judge Boasberg approved these subpoenas at the same time the Department of Justice was driving a politically charged prosecution of President Trump, an effort the voters themselves repudiated in last year's election. Now since then, it has come public that Judge Boasberg claims he did not know who he was authorizing those subpoenas directed to. That doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. When you have a judge... judge printing out findings that the target of a subpoena will destroy evidence and he doesn't even know who the hell the target is, churning them out like placemats at a Denny's. That is directly contrary to the judicial oath and to the rule of law. Now to Judge Deborah Boardman. Judge Deborah Boardman's sentencing decision did not end with one defendant, it reverberated across the entire judiciary. She imposed a sentence 22 years below the sentencing guidelines on Nicholas Roski, a man who traveled, armed himself with a gun, a knife, duct tape, zip ties, and traveled across the country with the intent to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Supreme Court justices. The sentencing disparity is massive. The Department of Justice correctly recognized this as an act of domestic terrorism and sought a 30-year sentence. Judge Boardman, however, imposed a mere eight-year term, reducing the punishment by more than two decades, a sentence so drastically out of step with the gravity of the offense that it cannot be squared with any plausible understanding of the judicial duty and discretion. She did so in her own explanation because Mr. Roski considered himself transgender. And because of that, instead of a 30-year sentence, he would be sentenced to eight years for the crime of attempting to murder at least one Supreme Court justice. To put that into context, Mr. Roski was 27 years old. In eight years, Mr. Roski will be 35 years old. And if Judge Boardman's sentence maintains, will be released and available to threaten judges and law clerks on the Supreme Court and throughout the country. That is a gross dereliction of duty. For that reason today, I've sent a letter to the Speaker of the House calling on the House to immediately advance the pending articles of impeachment against Chief Judge Boasberg and Judge Boardman. Both of these judges, I believe, meet the standard for impeachment and for conviction and removal of office. And that is what this hearing today will address. With that, I recognize Ranking Member Senator Whitehouse.