It took over three years, but the judicial conduct complaint against Judge Pauline Newman has finally left the building. Fix the Court reports that the complaint Federal Circuit Chief Judge Kimberly Moore identified against her now-99-year-old colleague back in March 2023 has decamped to the warmer climes of the Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit. For anyone just joining the stealth impeachment saga, Moore initiated the complaint against Judge Newman, then Moore’s own council adjudicated it, and that council barred Judge Newman from hearing cases in 2023, again in 2024, and again in 2025. Judges aren’t supposed to be able to impeach their peers, but the statute lets them stop assigning cases “on a temporary basis for a time certain.”

And if you’re creative enough, you can keep stacking “temporary” suspensions for a very long time. That sounds a bit cynical. Surely the Federal Circuit would say it genuinely respects Judge Newman’s active status, and will start assigning her cases again as soon as this is cleared up! It’s not like the court went out and officially commissioned a self-congratulatory cartoon of all of its members while refusing to include Newman. There was a lot of reason to doubt the suspension as a good faith “temporary” measure, but whatever benefit of the doubt the court could muster went out the window when it put out a video scrubbing a judge from the official court like Stalin airbrushing allies out of pictures.

Whatever the merits of the Federal Circuit’s effort to sideline their longest-serving colleague, it’s finally no longer being decided by the same court that brought the complaint. “Judges shouldn’t be judging the behavior of fellow judges they work down the hall from,” Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said. “It’s a clear conflict.” Indeed, it’s a conflict that most courts flag right off the bat. Courts can ask the Chief Justice to ship a complaint to another circuit under “exceptional circumstances,” and by Fix the Court’s count it’s happened more than two dozen times. In fact, Newman’s case is “the only complaint against a circuit judge that survived initial review in history where the chief judge didn’t request a transfer from the Chief Justice.”

Until now. It’s unclear what changed Chief Judge Moore’s mind. The Eleventh Circuit has had a busy docket of judicial complaints. This is where Judge Eleanor Ross had sex in chambers with a senior police official and then lied to investigators about it. That earned her a private reprimand and the slap-on-the-wrist of never getting to serve as chief judge. The reprimand was even carefully drafted to conceal her identity, a courtesy to the judge that lasted right up until anyone with the opinion and a ChatGPT account could crack the code. She also had to apologize to her former clerks, and when her council-ordered apology letters turned out to be three sentences of nothing, Chief Judge William Pryor decided no harm, no foul.

It’s also the court where Judge Roy Altman taped right-wing media hits from chambers calling the keffiyeh a “terror scarf,” raising at least the appearance of religious bias. Pryor tossed that complaint without bothering to appoint a committee, finding the allegations “lack any factual foundation or are conclusively refuted by objective evidence.” As Professor Steven Lubet wrote at the time, Pryor’s “failure to initiate an investigation set a regrettable example for the entire federal judiciary.”

Having gone soft on an Obama appointee and a Trump appointee, the Eleventh Circuit now gets a crack at a case about one of the few remaining Reagan appointees on the bench. Judge Newman didn’t have an affair in her office or try to become a podcast star by casting aspersions on Arab garb. Her only sin is staying on the court after her colleagues wanted her off. Technically,