In the 2020s, a proposal has been floated by Republican members of the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate to have one of the chambers vote to adopt a resolution to "expunge" one or both of the two impeachments of U.S. president Donald Trump, a Republican. Both of Trump's impeachments occurred in the first of his two nonconsecutive terms. Trump himself has called for the adoption of such resolutions. In June 2023, the effort received support from then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. No such resolutions, however, have yet been adopted. In 2026, Trump and his allies renewed efforts to have his impeachments declared expunged. House Speaker Mike Johnson dubbed it "a priority".
There is no precedent of the House voting to expunge a federal impeachment. Legal, political experts, and historians expressed skepticism as to the impact and significance that such a vote would have. Many have argued that such a vote could only be symbolic and would have little or no legal effect, while some differing opinions have argued that there is nothing to preclude Congress from revoking a previous impeachment action. Many commentators have characterized the proposal as an attempt by Republicans to delegitimize Trump's impeachments in the public's recollection.
Background
While serving as president of the United States, Donald Trump (a Republican) was twice impeached by the United States House of Representatives while it had Democratic Party majorities. His first impeachment was in 2019 for the Trump–Ukraine scandal. His second impeachment charged him with inciting the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Trump was acquitted in both of his impeachment trials before the United States Senate, as neither trial resulted in the two-thirds supermajority required to convict.
There is no direct precedent for an expungement of an impeachment, and scarce analogues in American government exist. One partial-analogue was the 1837 vote by a Democratic-controlled Senate to "expunge" an 1834 censure of Democratic president Andrew Jackson, with the president's party aiming to undo a censure adopted by a previous Whig-controlled Senate. In November 2010, Democratic Congressman Chaka Fattah introduced a House resolution which would have "disavow[ed]" the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton. His resolution attracted no cosponsors, and was referred to a congressional subcommittee with no further action ever taken on it.
History On February 1, 2020, days before the conclusion of Trump's first impeachment trial, Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin opined that Republicans should expunge the impeachment if they won a House majority in the upcoming 2020 House elections, tweeting, "The House of Representatives should EXPUNGE this sham impeachment in January 2021!" On February 5, the day that the impeachment trial ended in acquittal, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was quoted by the New York Post as remarking, "This is the fastest, weakest, most political impeachment in history. I don't think it should stay on the books." Two days after the impeachment trial ended, after being asked by a reporter about the prospect of having his impeachment expunged by the House, Trump remarked,
In 2022, Republican Congressman Markwayne Mullin introduced resolutions to remove Trump's impeachments from the Congressional Record. This received support from House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. At the time, the House had a Democratic Party majority and the resolution was not passed.
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. I understand why individuals want to do it, and we'd look at it."
On June 22, 2023, Republican Congresswomen Elise Stefanik, chair of the Republican House Conference, and Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a pair of resolutions to expunge Trump's impeachments which were then sent to the House Judiciary Committee.Multiple sources:
The next day, Speaker McCarthy lent his support to the resolutions.
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". The resolution authored by Greene would resolve to expunge the 2019 impeachment on the grounds that Trump had been "wrongfully accused of misconduct." The resolution authored by Stefanik would resolve to expunge the 2021 impeachment on the grounds that those who advanced the impeachment had failed to prove Trump had committed high crimes and misdemeanors.
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." House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, also a Democrat, characterized the effort as "pathetic".
In late July 2023, Politico published a report that unnamed sources had claimed that McCarthy had promised Trump that the House would vote to expunge Trump's impeachments prior to the House's August 2023 recess. The report said that this promise had been made by McCarthy as an effort to make peace with Trump, coming after McCarthy upset Trump with public comments in July 2023 on Trump's general election prospects as a 2024 presidential nominee. McCarthy publicly denied that such a promise had been made. Multiple weeks after the October 2023 removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, McCarthy called Trump to ask why he did not support him when he was facing removal. Trump responded with a retort asking why McCarthy had not expunged his impeachments and endorsed his 2024 presidential campaign. The 118th Congress concluded without any confessional action being taken on the two resolutions beyond their initial referral to committee.
On January 9, 2025 (days into the 119th Congress), Greene introduced a pair of proposed resolutions to expunge Trump's impeachments. She was joined by several Republican co-sponsors.Multiple sources: The resolution to expunge the first impeachment claimed that Trump was wrongfully accused of misconduct in the impeachment. The resolution to expunge the second impeachment claimed the impeachment should be expunged because House Democrats had not made an effort to understand why some Americans did not trust the results of the 2020 election.
The Trump administration acted in April 2026 to revive efforts to expunge one of Trump's prior impeachments. That month, Tulsi Gabbard (Trump's director of national intelligence) issued a report in which she questioned the circumstances that triggered the first impeachment. Her report, relying on what Forbes described as "seemingly flimsy evidence", questioned the motivations of the whistleblower, but did not question the veracity of facts cited by the articles of impeachment. Soon after, Alan Dershowitz (Trump's counsel in his first impeachment trial) argued in an interview that Trump could be able to request the United States Supreme Court or the United States Congress nullify the impeachment. Trump praised Dershowitz's remarks on social media. Right-wing outlet Just The News quoted Republican Congressman Jim Jordan as disclosing that he and other House members were exploring a resolution to expunge Trump's first impeachment. Days later, Republican Senator Rick Scott introduced a resolution to the Senate that, if adopted, would resolve that the chamber considers Trump's first impeachment trial to have lacked "legitimacy". Trump applauded the proposed resolution. That same month, Congressman Darrell Issa introduced a resolution in the House to expunge both Trump impeachments. In early June 2026, reporting emerged that Trump was pressuring House Republicans to expunge both of the impeachments from his first term. In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Mike Johnson (a Republican) praised the idea and called it "a priority" for House Republicans.
Analysis Such an expungement of an impeachment is unprecedented, as the United States Congress has never expunged an impeachment. Neither the United States Constitution nor the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives outline any processes for expunging (or otherwise undoing) an impeachment.
Legal and political experts have been skeptical as to the impact and significance that an expungement vote would actually have. In June 2023, Sara Dorn of Forbes wrote that, "politicos have widely mocked", the idea, "while experts have expressed uncertainty about its impact." At the same time, Claire Hansen of the U.S. News & World Report wrote of the possibility of removing the impeachments from the congressional record that, "it's far from clear that the House would have the legal or political authority to erase such a record." In January 2023, Samaa Khullar of Salon described experts as largely having "mock[ed]" the concept of expunging Trump's impeachments. A 2026 article by three writers for The Wall Street Journal opined that while an expungement resolution, "would allow Trump to claim a symbolic victory on a matter that has dogged him since his first term, [as] part of a broader effort [by Trump] to burnish his presidential legacy. It would have little legal significance,…according to experts." In June 2023, USA Today characterized the prevailing opinion of experts as being that the House lacked the authority to remove from the Congressional Record previous votes of the House, and also noted that the House's ability to erase record of the impeachment was further prohibited by the fact that records of the impeachment trials were records of the Senate and not House. 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,
In 2022, Steve Benen of MSNBC wrote of the idea, "The [Republican] effort to rewrite history is ridiculous." Comparing it to the 1837 expungement of Jackson's censure he wrote, "The point at the time [of Jackson's expungement] was for partisans to say that the congressional action happened, but for the sake of the historical record, it didn't really count. Trump's acolytes appear to have similar intentions now." In June 2023, Ed Kilgore of The Intelligencer argued that the legal parallels to the 1837 expungement of Andrew Jackson's censure are even limited, since impeachments are an action outlined in the United States Constitution, while censures are not. Georgetown Law Professor Josh Chafetz noted that another distinction is that a censure is the act of only one chamber of the United States Congress, whereas Trump's impeachments each involved both an impeachment vote in the House of Representatives and an impeachment trial in the Senate, remarking,
Chafetz further opined that a vote by the House to "expunge" Trump's impeachment,
In July 2023, characterizing the effort as "political theater", fellow Georgetown Law professor David Super remarked,
Super also remarked that the effort would be ineffective at removing memory of the impeachments from Americans' minds, remarking, "We all know what happened. We saw it on TV. It's memorialized on the internet." University of Texas at Austin professor of law and government Jeffery Abramson similarly opined that the such a resolution would not alter the historians' and the public's awareness that Trump had been impeached, remarking,