Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised to push for expungement of Trump’s impeachment: The House Speaker has had a mixed relationship with Donald Trump over the years, but he recently declared his support for efforts to expunge the president’s impeachments. It turns out, per a new report, he had
Donald Trump Could Get a Big Break…
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has clashed at times with former President Donald Trump, including a famous confrontation on the day of January 6, and his declaration a week later that Trump “bears responsibility” for the insurrection.
But while Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), then the Senate Majority Leader, are now sworn enemies, Trump and McCarthy soon made nice, with the then-Minority Leader visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021.
Now, however, McCarthy has reportedly angered the former president by refusing to endorse Trump in the 2024 election. And per Politico, he has made a promise to Trump, to “placate” him- by promising that the push to expunge the former president’s two impeachments will receive a House vote, Politico reported Thursday.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) introduced separate bills in June to expunge Trump’s two impeachments, which took place in 2019 and 2021.
This was different from the many quixotic attempts to impeach President Biden, by Greene and others, in a key way: It had the support of Stefanik, a major Trump loyalist and member of the House Republican leadership, as well as McCarthy, who said quickly that he was supportive of the idea.
Per Politico, that promise has a heretofore unreported backstory.
After McCarthy said in an interview in June that Donald Trump might not be the nominee, the former president was angered.
“He needs to endorse me — today!,” Trump told staff, per Politico, which also reported that McCarthy had indicated that he would announce his backing of the former president otherwise.
As a result, McCarthy made a promise to the former president: “The House would vote to expunge the two impeachments against the former president. And — as McCarthy would communicate through aides later that same day — they would do so before August recess,” Politico said.
However, it’s not clear that McCarthy has the votes to pass such a resolution, with Politico stating that several House Republicans, in the narrowly divided chamber, “are loath to revisit Trump’s impeachments.” The story added that while Stefanik authored the expungement resolution — and pushed numerous 2020 election conspiracies in doing so — some members of McCarthy’s leadership team are less enthused with the idea.
And further, constitutional scholars have mostly said that there is no constitutional ability or process for Congress to expunge the impeachment of a president by a previous Congress. An impeachment vote in the House is followed by a trial in the Senate, and that process has already taken place, twice.
“It is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached,” Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, a commentator who normally backs Trump’s legal positions, told Reuters.
“It is just a further continuation of the House Republicans acting as Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded lawyers,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who served as lead counsel to the Democrats in the first impeachment and since been elected to Congress, told CBS News. “It’s telling who is introducing them and it’s essentially whoever is trying to curry the most favor with Donald Trump.
But even so, should the House pass such a resolution, Trump will undoubtedly claim, for the remainder of the campaign and probably the rest of his life, that his impeachments have been undone. And if it doesn’t pass, the former president would likely vow retribution against any House Republican voting against him.
Politico also quoted a Republican member of Congress, anonymously, about a lack of enthusiasm for such a move.
“I’m for Trump,” one senior GOP member told Politico. “The problem is: If you have an expungement, and it goes to the floor and fails — which it probably will — then the media will treat it like it’s a third impeachment, and it will show disunity among Republican ranks. It’s a huge strategic risk.
And per the Washington Post, McCarthy has denied that he made such a promise to Trump.
“There’s no deal, but I’ve been very clear, from long before, when I voted against impeachments that they did it for purely political purposes,” the Speaker told the newspaper. “I support expungement, but there’s no deal out there.”
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Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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