Del. Bob Marshall (R-VA)
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring won a close election last November after making his support for marriage equality clear throughout the campaign. Now, a member of the Virginia state House
wants to impeach him for refusing to defend the state's marriage ban:
Marshall filed the resolutions seeking an inquiry for Herring’s impeachment last week, but in a new email to supporters, he outlined his reasons for doing so. “Removing all standards against same sex or sodomy ‘marriage,’” he explained, is “to the detriment of children and the well-being of society.” [...]
In the email, Marshall also extended a threat to impeach judges who might overturn bans on same-sex marriage. Rulings based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection “make no sense,” he argued, because when that Amendment was ratified, “sodomy was a felony in nearly every state.”
The latter is a pretty empty threat since most of the judges overturning marriage bans—including Judge Arenda Wright Allen, who overturned Virginia's ban—are federal judges. There's a little thing called the Supremacy Clause, and one of its consequences is that state legislatures don't get to impeach federal judges. And impeaching an attorney general for following through on his campaign positions and doing something that's being done in several other states ... even most Virginia Republicans don't seem to have much interest in making themselves look that bad.