The very idea of Congress un-impeaching someone seems laughable. That doesn’t mean House Republicans won’t try to do it anyway.
As we discussed last week, two prominent GOP members — House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik of New York and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene — unveiled a pair of measures to “expunge” both of Donald Trump’s impeachments. (Greene’s resolution would effectively cancel the former president’s 2019 impeachment, while Stefanik’s measure would undo his 2021 impeachment. Both Republicans are co-sponsoring each other’s bills.)
To be sure, ridiculous measures such as these are introduced all the time, and they’re fairly easy to ignore because they stand little chance of advancing. But as the Associated Press reported, the “expunge” scheme picked up a powerful endorsement the day after it began in earnest.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Friday he supports the idea of expunging the two impeachments of Donald Trump as hard-right Republican allies of the former president introduce a pair of proposals to declare it as though the historic charges never happened. McCarthy told reporters that he agrees with Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik who want to erase the charges against Trump from the former president’s impeachments of 2019 and 2021.
“I think it is appropriate,” the House speaker told reporters. “Just as I thought before — that you should expunge it, because it never should have gone through.”
To briefly recap for those just joining us, it was in early 2020, just two days after his first Senate impeachment trial wrapped up, when Trump first broached the subject of invalidating what had happened to him. “Should they expunge the impeachment in the House?” Trump asked during a brief Q&A with reporters. “They should because it was a hoax.”
A handful of GOP members pushed the idea in the last Congress, though the efforts were ignored — there was a Democratic majority in the House at the time — but as the current Congress got underway, McCarthy said he was willing to take a look at the idea.
Evidently, the House speaker is done looking, and he’s ready to throw his support behind the gambit. (As for how such an unprecedented procedure would work, my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown wrote a terrific piece on this that ran this morning.)
What’s more, this isn’t the only step McCarthy is willing to take to make his far-right flank happy. Punchbowl News reported:
Speaker Kevin McCarthy plans to open an impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland if House Republicans don’t get what they consider satisfactory answers from the Justice Department on the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
As part of the push, the House speaker has effectively directed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to bring David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who investigated Hunter Biden, before the panel. As for what far-right House Republicans might consider “satisfactory answers,” it’s hardly outlandish to wonder if there’s anything that could fully satisfy GOP members desperate to impeach someone for something. What’s less clear is what’s driving McCarthy’s latest declarations. In the recent past, the California Republican was opposed to impeachment crusades and didn’t seem at all interested in pursing a Trump-based legislative agenda. Now, the House speaker has raised the prospect of impeaching multiple cabinet secretaries, and he’s on board with trying to un-impeach the former president. We’ve never received a full and detailed list of the private side deals McCarthy struck in January to get his speaker’s gavel, or the more recent agreements he reached after the House Freedom Caucus seized control of the House floor. It’s hard not to wonder: Is McCarthy backing outlandish ideas because he genuinely believes they’re worthwhile, or is he still repaying debts to his more radical members?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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