This man is a federal district judge, who's appointment and removal are governed by Article 2 of the Constitution. Specifically, he must be nominated by the president, and confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime term. While he converts to senior status at some point, that doesn't change much in his case*. To remove him, you must have the House of Representative pass a bill of impeachment, the senate must hold an impeachment hearing, and 60 senators must vote in favor. That bars him from all federal service.
To change local district procedure, the Chief Judge can simply make it so. A lot easier than getting Senators to agree on something. One guy who's under a lot of outside pressure (from appeals courts and potentially the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who senators were asking to look into the issue) is highly motivated to fix a problem in his house, so to speak.
Honestly I see things like this on Hacker News all the time, some obscure (to me) latin phrase that I've never seen outside of these message boards. Is there some specific body of literature that sprinkles latin phrases in otherwise common english text?
It happens, but generally for criminal reasons: https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/impeachments-federal-judg...
To institute a policy that increases fairness of the whole system instead of targeting a specific individual makes sense. After all there is nothing to say that someone else (or several someones) wouldn't have the same issue.
This solves the problem, without having to literally make it an act of congress.
A central design goal of the US system is to prevent any one person or group from getting too much power. Judges in particular were seen by the Founders as an important check on the power of the legislative and executive branches of government, so those 2 branches probably simply do not have the power to remove the judge. Other judges, perhaps on the Supreme Court, might have the power to remove the judge, but only for breaches of ethical standards.
Practically it’s easier to force a resignation than impeach.
In both cases, appeals are the accepted method to solve the issue.
As we saw with the Trump impeachment, getting a 2/3 vote in the Senate is exceedingly difficult.