Former President Donald Trump is the only president to be impeached twice. Both Senate trials ended in acquittal. But that’s not enough for two leading Republicans, who last week introduced a pair of resolutions to “expunge” Trump’s impeachments, making it as though they never happened — and it’s an effort that seems well within the powers of the House GOP to do.
The draft resolutions are the handiwork of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who each have sponsored one bill and co-sponsored the other. When the two entered the House, it would have been hard to imagine them working together on anything. But Stefanik has completely rewritten her political DNA from moderate to MAGA, a transformation that helped her become the chair of the House Republican Conference. At the same time, Greene has been shifting from the far fringe of the party into an ally of the House leadership.
There’s nothing in the rules saying the House can’t expunge an impeachment.
Stefanik rose to real prominence as a partisan defender during Trump’s first impeachment, throwing out whatever absurd talking point could deflect from the then-president’s attempt to extort the government of Ukraine for his own political gain. Meanwhile, Greene has been a staunch supporter of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, frequently referring to them as “political prisoners.” Trump’s urging his supporters to march on the Capitol before they attacked it was the basis for his second impeachment. It makes sense, then, that the two would partner on an issue they’ve built their congressional careers around.
As my colleague Steve Benen has noted, soon after the first impeachment trial ended with an acquittal, Trump began musing about the idea of “expunging” it, but only this year, with Republicans back in control, did it become a possibility. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., agreed to “look at” the idea soon after he won the gavel this year and told reporters Friday he supports Greene and Stefanik’s resolutions.
This is a situation with very few parallels in the history of Congress, leaving three core questions unanswered: Can the House even “expunge” the impeachments? What effect would doing so have? Can the resolutions pass?
On the first point, this appears to be a “dog playing basketball” situation: There’s nothing in the rules saying the House can’t expunge an impeachment. The Constitution grants the House the “sole power of impeachment” and the Senate the “sole power to try all impeachments.” That has led the courts to take a hands-off approach on impeachment-related matters and given Congress a wide berth to figure out what the impeachment process looks like.
Impeachment is a political matter, not a legal one. The common comparison is that articles of impeachment are akin to criminal charges’ being filed, which are then tried in an impeachment court. Carrying that metaphor through, it tracks that much as arrests and charges can be expunged from civilians’ records, the House could expunge articles of impeachment from Trump’s.
As for the practical effect the resolutions from Greene and Stefanik would have, that’s less clear. When a court orders an expungement, the records in question are typically sealed or destroyed. What would that mean in the case of a set of resolutions the House has passed? The idea that the text of the resolutions would be stricken from future copies of the Congressional Record, say, or pulled down from public-facing websites seems unlikely. I reached out to the House Office of the Clerk to ask what would happen should these resolutions pass, but I hadn’t gotten a response as of Friday afternoon.
Politically speaking, though, the benefit of expunging Trump’s impeachment becomes clearer. In civilian cases, expungement is often done so the person in question has an easier job passing background checks and applying for jobs. Trump is, in a very real sense, attempting to get his old job back, and the impeachments are a weight on his campaign. Trump would love to say not only that he was acquitted twice but also that the charges had been wiped away entirely.
Politically speaking, though, the benefit of expunging Trump’s impeachment becomes clearer.
As for whether these resolutions might pass, it’s not hard to imagine their passing, especially with McCarthy’s support. All but two of the 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment have left office. The odds that enough GOP members would stick their necks out to vote against such resolutions are as slim as the majority the GOP holds.
But I can’t say that’s a guarantee just yet based on the substance of the drafts as filed. You’d think that Greene, as the historically more incendiary one, would be source of potential trouble. Her draft, though, is the briefer of the two, leaning on the current GOP obsession with an FBI document that includes an accusation (but not proof) that Joe Biden acted corruptly when he was vice president. According to Greene’s logic, that shows that Trump was acting properly in his attempt to get dirt on Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
But the language of Stefanik’s resolution relating to Trump’s second impeachment may be more likely to fail. While not explicitly claiming the 2020 election was stolen, the preambulatory clauses more or less say there were plenty reasons to be skeptical of the results. Stefanik walks right up to that line in a clause that says Trump is the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1888 “to have increased his vote from his initial election and seemingly still not won reelection in the subsequent cycle.” That “seemingly” is doing a lot of work.
There are enough Republicans from swing districts who might be wary of backing a resolution that all but defends Trump’s attempted election theft. After all, there are still potentially more criminal charges to come related to that saga, including in Georgia and from special counsel Jack Smith. But if Stefanik were to tone down the language and simply focus on the supposed technicalities that made up the Senate GOP’s reasoning for acquitting Trump in that case? She might have a winner on her hands.
If that were to happen and the House were to pass the two resolutions, it wouldn’t prevent people from discussing the impeachments. Nor would it scrub the coverage of those impeachments from the media. We saw the impeachments happen, and they’ve been imprinted on the national memory. But Trump would be able to say with a straight face on the campaign trail and the debate stage that he was actually never impeached — and for once, he wouldn’t be totally lying.
