A proposal has been floated by some Republican members of the United States House of Representatives of having the Republican-led House vote to "expunge" the two impeachments of former U.S. president Donald Trump, a Republican.
Legal, political experts, and historians have expressed skepticism as to the impact and significance that such a vote would have. Many have argued that such a vote could only be symbolic and would have little or no legal effect, while some differing opinions have argued that there is nothing to preclude the Congress from revoking a previous impeachment action. Many commentators have characterized the proposal as an attempt by Republicans to delegitimize Trump's impeachments in the public's recollection.
In June 2023, the effort received support from then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
See also: First impeachment of Donald Trump and Second impeachment of Donald Trump.
While serving as president of the United States, Donald Trump (a Republican) was twice impeached by the United States House of Representatives while it had Democratic Party majorities. His first impeachment was in 2019 for the Trump–Ukraine scandal. His second impeachment charged him with inciting the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Trump was acquitted in both of his impeachment trials before the United States Senate, with neither trial receiving the two-thirds margin required to convict.[1] [2]
There is no direct precedent for an expungement of an impeachment, and scarce analogues in American government. One partial-analogue was the 1837 vote by a Democratic-controlled Senate voted to "expunge" an 1834 censure of Democratic president Andrew Jackson. This censure had been adopted by a previous Whig-controlled Senate.[3] In November 2010, Democratic Congressman Chaka Fattah introduced a House resolution which would have "disavowed" the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton. This resolution was referred to a congressional subcommittee and no further action was ever taken on it.[4]
On February 1, 2020, days before the conclusion of Trump's first impeachment trial, Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin opined that Republicans should expunge the impeachment if they won a House majority in the upcoming 2020 House elections, tweeting, "The House of Representatives should EXPUNGE this sham impeachment in January 2021!"[5] On February 5, the day that the impeachment trial ended in acquittal, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (a Republican) was quoted by the New York Post as remarking, "This is the fastest, weakest, most political impeachment in history. I don’t think it should stay on the books."[6] [7] Two days after the impeachment trial ended, after being asked by a reporter about the prospect of having his impeachment expunged by the House, Trump remarked,
In 2022, Republican Congressman Markwayne Mullin introduced resolutions to remove Trump's impeachments from the Congressional Record.[8] This received support from House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik.[1] At the time, the House had a Democratic Party majority and the resolution was not passed.
On January 12, 2023, Kevin McCarthy, by then recently elected to serve as speaker of the House, voiced openness to the concept, remarking, "I would understand why members would want to bring that forward. I understand why individuals want to do it, and we'd look at it."
On June 22, 2023, Republican Congresswomen Elise Stefanik (chair of the Republican House Conference) and Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a pair of resolutions to expunge Trump's impeachments which were then sent to the House Judiciary Committee.[9] The next day, Speaker McCarthy lent his support to the resolutions.[10]
In July 2023, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, condemned the effort, remarking, "The extreme MAGA Republicans are more concerned with settling scores on behalf of the former twice impeached, President of the United States of America, the insurrectionist in chief, Donald Trump, instead of solving problems for the American people." House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, also a Democrat, characterized the effort as "pathetic".[11]
In late July 2023, Politico published a report that unnamed sources had claimed that McCarthy had promised Trump that the House would vote to expunge Trump's impeachments prior to the House's August 2023 recess. The report said that this promise had been made by McCarthy as an effort to make peace with Trump, coming after McCarthy upset Trump with public comments in July 2023 on Trump's general election prospects as a 2024 presidential nominee.[12] McCarthy publicly denied that such a promise had been made.[13], no votes had been called to expunge the impeachments.
Multiple weeks after the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, McCarthy called Trump to ask why he didn't support him when he was facing removal. Trump responded by asking why he didn't expunge his impeachments and endorse his 2024 presidential campaign.[14] [15]
Such an expungement of an impeachment is unprecedented, as the United States Congress has never expunged an impeachment.[16] Legal and political experts have been skeptical as to the impact and significance that such a vote would actually have. In June 2023, Sara Dorn of Forbes wrote that, "politicos have widely mocked", the idea, "while experts have expressed uncertainty about its impact."[17] At the same time, Claire Hansen of the U.S. News & World Report wrote of the possibility of removing the impeachments from the congressional record that, "it’s far from clear that the House would have the legal or political authority to erase such a record."[16] In January 2023, Samaa Khullar of Salon described experts as largely having "mock[ed]" the concept of expunging Trump's impeachments.[18]
In 2022, Steve Benen of MSNBC wrote of the idea, "The [Republican] effort to rewrite history is ridiculous." Comparing it to the 1837 expungement of Jackson's censure he wrote, "The point at the time [of Jackson's expungement] was for partisans to say that the congressional action happened, but for the sake of the historical record, it didn’t really count. Trump’s acolytes appear to have similar intentions now."[19]
In June 2023, Ed Kilgore of The Intelligencer argued that the legal parallels to the 1837 expungement of Andrew Jackson's censure are limited, since impeachments are an action outlined in the United States Constitution, while censure is not.[20] Georgetown Law Professor Josh Chafetz noted that another distinction is that a censure is the act of only one chamber of the United States Congress, whereas Trump's impeachments each involved both an impeachment vote in the House of Representatives and an impeachment trial in the Senate,[16] [21] remarking,
Chafetz further opined that a vote by the House to "expunge" Trump's impeachment,
In July 2023, characterizing the effort as "political theater", fellow Georgetown Law professor David Super remarked,
Super also remarked that the effort would be ineffective at removing memory of the impeachments from Americans' minds, remarking, "We all know what happened. We saw it on TV. It's memorialized on the internet."
In 2020, Brookings Institution senior fellow in governance studies and George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder opined that any motion to expunge would be "cosmetic". She noted that despite the vote to "expunge" his censure, "we still count Andrew Jackson as the only censured president." Binder further remarked,
In July 2023, historian Joshua Zeitz wrote an article that was published by Politico that opined that Jackson censure expungement vote provides historical evidence that such a vote does not remove a previous congressional action from historical legitimacy, concluding,
In June 2023, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote that the effort to expunge Trump's impeachments, "would be laughable if not so dangerous": Robinson further wrote,
In June 2023, conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School expressed the belief that the idea of expunging an impeachment is nonsensical, since impeachments do not involve criminal charges. Turley had been a witness during the 2019 impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, having been called to provide expert testimony on behalf of Trump's defense.[22] [23] In June 2023, Turley remarked, "[Impeachment] is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached," adding that the United States Constitution lacks any provision for expunging impeachments. Turley, however noted that an expungement resolution could still be historically significant in expressing a congress' belief that an earlier congress' impeachment had been an error.[24] Turley had, in 2020, earlier commented on the concept of expunging Trump's first impeachment by remarking,