House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Speaker McCarthy is backing a GOP-led push to “expunge” the impeachments of former President Trump.
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik have introduced resolutions to absolve Trump.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley told Reuters that the Constitution doesn’t list provisions for expunging impeachments.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday threw his support behind a conservative-led effort to “expunge” the impeachments of former President Donald Trump.
In backing the effort, led by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Elise Stefanik of New York, McCarthy is putting his weight behind their goal of removing the charges against Trump from the impeachments of 2019 and 2021.
“I think it is appropriate, just as I thought before, that you should expunge it, because it never should have gone through,” the California Republican told reporters on Capitol Hill.
McCarthy said that the 2019 impeachment was “was not based on true facts” while adding that the 2021 vote was taken “on the basis of no due process.”
But the speaker later remarked that the resolutions introduced by Greene and Stefanik would need to proceed through the committee process.
In 2019, the then-Democratic-led House voted to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress regarding his alleged efforts to solicit Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. And two years later, the House voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection” over his role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The Senate acquitted Trump after both of his impeachment trials.
Trump last November launched his bid to secure the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and remains the frontrunner in the race, with candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina so far struggling to dethrone the former president from his perch at the top of the party.
And the GOP-led resolutions to “expunge” charges would give Trump a major talking point as he continues to campaign in the run-up to next year’s primary contests.
The House has a slender 222-212 Republican majority, which gives the most ardent conservatives in the GOP conference a substantial amount of leverage in what passes with McCarthy at the helm of the chamber. And it puts added pressure on the speaker as Trump continues to wield power among many Republicans in the chamber, some of whom have already backed his 2024 campaign.
Still, McCarthy has not yet said when the proposals from Greene and Stefanik would move forward, and the speaker also stated that he had not yet spoken with Trump about the expungement push.
And questions remain about whether there is even the possibility of removing an impeachment from the record.
Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, who before his election to Congress served as the lead Democratic counsel in the 2019 impeachment, criticized the GOP-led effort in an interview with Reuters.
“The legality of doing it is highly questionable,” he told the news outlet. “That won’t stop the Republicans from doing it, and it’s just further placating Donald Trump.”
Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, told Reuters that the Constitution doesn’t list any provisions for expunging impeachments.
“It is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached,” Turley remarked in an email.