Democrats may revive impeachment if they seize Congress in November; Trump and his allies, meanwhile, aim to erase his two impeachments.
Impeachment remains a possibility if the Democrats win control of Congress in the November midterms, according to the party leadership. Yet they are far from starry-eyed about removing President Donald Trump. “I think the voting patterns are fairly predictable,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), the anticipated Democratic whip, to CNN’s Inside Politics on Sunday. Impeachment, he cautioned, is “not a panacea,” as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.), who would lead the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats win the House, noted, it’s “one more tool in the toolkit, and we will use it if we need to use it.”
Meanwhile, Trump and his congressional allies are weighing a contrary scheme to erase the president’s impeachments. A recent Wall Street Journal report indicates Trump has spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) about having his two first-term impeachments “expunged,” with Alan Dershowitz reportedly involved.
As is often the case when Trump proposes a radical legal maneuver, the first question is: “Can he pull that off?” A more meaningful question for those who care about presidential accountability is whether symbolic impeachment skirmishes are the best use of precious time.
On the merits of the first question, there is in fact a tinge of precedent for this curious gambit. It touches one of Trump’s favorite presidents, the incendiary Andrew Jackson, whose portrait now dominates the Oval Office.
In 1834, Sen. Henry Clay (W–Ky.) led a Senate effort to formally rebuke “Old Hickory” after the president, in the dispute over the Second Bank of the United States, dismissed his Treasury secretary and refused a Senate demand for justification. The censure resolution, shepherded by Clay, declared that “the President, in the late executive proceeding in relation to the public revenue, has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.”
Naturally, Jackson initially considered challenging Clay to a duel. When his temper cooled, he instead issued a lengthy protest against the Senate’s action. Three years later, with Jacksonian Democrats back in control of the Senate, he had his allies vote to remove the censure from the Senate records.
A clerk struck the censure from the Senate Journal with black ink and penciled “Expunged by order of the Senate” on the page. Yet the original censure remains plainly discernible.
What, beyond a quirky historical tidbit for D.C. bar trivia, can we draw from this episode? Impeachment by the House functions, in part, as a constitutional rebuke—a formal mark against a president’s record. The Jackson case implies that Trump could obtain a congressional vote to “expunge” his two House censures. But would that matter? As Rep. Don Bacon (R–Neb.) told The Wall Street Journal, “It’s silly. What happened is history.”
“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Journal. But simply stamping a historical asterisk on his impeachments isn’t likely to change minds about that reality.
In truth, both impeachments were thoroughly warranted. The first, connected to Ukraine-related dealings in 2019, involved a classic attempt to “use the available federal machinery to screw [a] political enem[y],” a phrase drawn from a notorious Nixon-era memo circulated by White House Counsel John Dean. The conduct that led to Trump’s second impeachment in 2021 was even more plainly impeachable: He incited a mob to pressure Congress and his own vice president to overturn the results of an election he had lost.
If Trump wants to prove his adversaries failed to stop him, that point has already been demonstrated. He managed to endure both impeachments, secure his party’s nomination, and reclaim the presidency. Today, among the seven Republicans who voted to convict him in the second impeachment, only one—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—lives to tell the tale. A performative “expungement” at this stage would amount to a victory lap, which is presumably the intention behind it.
Yet there are broader takeaways about impeachment’s ongoing role as the ultimate constitutional check against presidential overreach. At the outset of the Trump era, many believed that even without Senate removal, a House-impeachment blemish would deter bad behavior. Then Trump arrived and, in a astonishingly rapid sequence, doubled the number of presidential impeachments in American history. What have we learned from that experiment?
First, the typical warnings about impeachment being ruinous to governance proved overblown once again. Impeaching Trump twice did not damage the country. Whether it yielded enough benefit to justify the effort remains debatable.
During Trump’s first term, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie argued that impeachment battles were “a distraction” from larger battles over the scope and powers of government. Yes, Trump deserved impeachment, but what practical outcome would that have achieved? Could it have reduced federal power or diminished the presidency? While I didn’t see it that way at the time, I must admit, in hindsight, he had a point.
During Trump 1.0, Congress twice swung the metaphorical “100-ton gun” into place, and each time, when the fuse was lit, a cartoon banner reading “Bang” popped out. Is there any reason to expect the third attempt to be any different?
Never say never. It remains possible that Trump could escalate and commit a fresh offense that would provide an even stiffer test of his famed boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and escape political ruin.
But for now, the evidence points to the Framers having set the bar for presidential removal too high. Surmounting that hurdle—if it even happened—would remove a single abusive president. If Congress could muster the political will to accomplish that, its efforts would be better directed toward reforms with lasting impact: curbing presidential war powers, reigning in national emergency powers, and limiting the authority to enact laws by executive fiat. Achieving these changes will be daunting, but the payoff would be worth the effort.
