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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he would consider reviving a proposal from hard-line Republicans in the last Congress to expunge one or both of Donald Trump's impeachments as one of the GOP's legislative priorities.
Democrats used their House majorities in 2019 and 2021 to twice impeach Trump—once for allegedly threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on political opponent Joe Biden and again for allegedly inciting the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Neither led to a conviction in the subsequent Senate trial. Later, allies of the former president, led by Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin, ran House resolutions proposing to expunge those impeachments from Trump's record.
The most recent resolution, which did not pass, cited myriad conspiracy theories about the veracity of the 2020 election and decried the "rabid partisanship the Democrats displayed in exercising one of the most grave and consequential powers with which the House is charged."
The resolution also gained some influential supporters, including current Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, who was instrumental in developing the GOP's policy slate for the current Congress.
McCarthy, at least to some degree, seemed sympathetic to the cause when asked about it Thursday.
"I would understand why members would want to bring that forward," he told reporters during a Thursday press conference on Capitol Hill. "But I understand why individuals want to do it, and we'd look at it."
Given that expunging an impeachment has never been tried before, it's not clear if he could. House practices offer no guidance for reversing a presidential impeachment. And while there is a historical precedent in place—the Senate once voted to expunge a censure of President Andrew Jackson after his battles with the opposition Whig Party—it is an imperfect one, largely because impeachment is a function of both chambers of Congress while a censure is not.
"My argument would be that an impeachment cannot be expunged because it has effect outside of the House—that is, it causes the Senate to hold a trial," Joshua Chafetz, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, told Newsweek.
"Expunging the Jackson censure is different, I think, because that was the action of a single chamber that had no effect beyond expressing the views of that chamber," he said.
Online, some have posited a different view.
After Mullin's first effort to expunge Trump's impeachments, Indiana University law professor and constitutional law expert Gerard Magliocca suggested in a December 2019 post on PrawfsBlawg—a well-known sounding board for legal scholars—that an impeachment could be expunged for similar reasons.
"It's never been done before, but I am hard-pressed to see why the House is bound by an impeachment passed by a prior one," he wrote at the time. "This is different from an impeachment and a conviction. The Senate's judgment in impeachment trials is final. The impeachment itself, though, is not different from any other House resolution."
Still, history never forgets.
"I doubt, though, that a repeal of an impeachment will mean that people will say that President Trump was not impeached," Magliocca said.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more