Proposed expungements of the impeachments of Donald Trump
Many commentators have characterized the proposal as an attempt by Republicans to delegitimize Trump's impeachments in the public's recollection.
[4] In November 2010, Democratic Congressman Chaka Fattah introduced a House resolution which would have "disavow[ed]" the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
[8][10]In 2022, Republican Congressman Markwayne Mullin introduced resolutions to remove Trump's impeachments from the Congressional Record.
[12] 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.
[1] The proposed resolutions (one for each impeachment) instructed that the intended effect of expungement would be to make things, "as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives".
[15][16][17] The resolution authored by Greene would resolve to expunge the 2019 impeachment on the grounds that Trump had been "wrongfully accused of misconduct."
[15][17] 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.
[15] On January 9, 2025 (days into the 119th Congress), Greene introduced a pair of proposed resolutions to expunge Trump's impeachments.
[12] In June 2023, Sara Dorn of Forbes wrote that, "politicos have widely mocked", the idea, "while experts have expressed uncertainty about its impact.
"[25] In January 2023, Samaa Khullar of Salon described experts as largely having "mock[ed]" the concept of expunging Trump's impeachments.
Once it has impeached, the matter is sort of out of the House's hands at that point, which I think makes it importantly different than a censure.
There's nothing in the Constitution that authorizes just the House to take an action of this kind, and since the framers certainly knew how to write that, as to those who wrote some of the amendments, we have to assume that there's no such power exists... .
[29] 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".
[30] In July 2023, historian Joshua Zeitz wrote an article that was published by Politico that opined that the previous Jackson censure expungement vote provides historical evidence that such a vote does not remove a previous congressional action from historical legitimacy, concluding, Once impeached – or, in this case, twice – a president cannot be unimpeached.
[32] In July 2023, The Dallas Morning News reported that there was significant doubt that a House resolution could have authority to amend the Congressional Record, and that even regardless of whether the House had the authority to remove the House's adoptions of articles of impeachment from the Congressional Record, it would still seemingly lack authority to remove record of the impeachment trials since those would be records of Senate (not House) proceedings,[29] 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": The aim appears to be to allow Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee in next year's election, to claim that despite the events we all witnessed, he was never impeached at all.
Would they be ripped out and destroyed?Writing for the government watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Gabe Lezra observed that not only would it be unprecedented for the House to adopt a resolution expunging impeachments, but that he could find no record of any previous instance in which such resolutions were given any serious consideration.
[12][28]In June 2023, Hayes Brown of MSNBC noted that there is no rule explicitly forbidding such an action and that the judiciary has generally taken a "hands-off approach" to questions related to impeachment.
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.
[37]In 2022, Jesse Rifkin of GovTrack Insider observed that, "nothing in the Constitution explicitly precludes Congress from taking an impeachment back.
And if criminal charges can be expunged from civilian records, one can see why Republicans embrace a kind of legal magical thinking in their efforts to legitimize what is, ultimately, a political charade.
"[34] Democrat Nancy Pelosi, at the time the speaker of the House, expressed her belief that expungement of an impeachment is not something that can actually be done.
"[19] In June 2023, writers for Fox News, Axios, and The Independent each characterized the impact of a resolution to expunge as being "largely symbolic".
"[44] In June 2023, writing that "it is not at all clear that [expungement] can actually be done," the editorial board of The Fresno Bee characterized the effort as an, "attempted whitewashing of Trump's soiled record as the only chief executive to ever be impeached twice," and criticized Kevin McCarthy (whose district represented part of Fresno) for supporting the effort.
[45][46] In June 2023, Amanda Marcotte of Salon opined that an expungement vote would be part of a Republican Party "war on history".
[47] Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark characterized such a resolution as being an effort at "gaslighting" the public into believing that the impeachments never happened.
[48] Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press characterized the proposal to expunge Trump's impeachments as the "latest [effort] by Trump's allies to rewrite the narrative of the defeated president's tenure in office as he seeks another term in the White House," and characterized McCarthy's support of it as highlighting the political pressure that McCarthy is receiving from right-wing Republicans.
