Month: June 2023

Ted Cruz calls on House to investigate impeaching Biden over Hunter allegations: ‘Direct evidence’

Posted on by Latest Political News on Fox News

Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz is urging the House to look into impeaching President Biden after an IRS whistleblower on the Hunter Biden probe told Congress that the president's son invoked his father to pressure a Chinese business partner through WhatsApp and claimed the elder Biden was in the room while he was making deals.

Asked at what point the investigation and problems pertaining to Hunter Biden turn into an issue for the president, which could lead to impeachment efforts by Republicans, Cruz said: "It is right now."

"Look, this WhatsApp is direct evidence of Joe Biden abusing his government power to enrich his son, and, assuming 10% for the big guy, to enrich himself," Cruz continued. "Remember, this WhatsApp says ‘we want to know.’ This is not just me, Hunter, just mooching off my dad. . . . Of course the House needs to investigate it, but the stunning thing is what the IRS whistleblower says is [Department of Justice], Merrick Garland prevented an investigation even into this message." l

Garland has denied that there was any interference in the Hunter Biden probe.

Cruz's remarks came during a new episode of the senator's podcast, which is called Verdict with Ted Cruz.

HUNTER BIDEN-LINKED ACCOUNT RECEIVED $5 MILLION DAYS AFTER THREATENING MESSAGES: 'SITTING HERE WITH MY FATHER'

Cruz discussed allegations from an IRS whistleblower released by House Republicans this week, where an investigator on the Hunter Biden probe claimed there had been unprecedented efforts to prevent investigations into Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign and into his presidency.

Whistleblower Gary Shapley Jr. — who oversaw the IRS probe into the president's son — said the IRS had obtained a WhatsApp message dated July 30, 2017, from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, CEO of Harvest Fund Management, in which Hunter alleged that he was with his father and named him to put pressure on Zhao to fulfill a commitment.

"And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction."

"I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father," Hunter Biden reportedly said.

"This WhatsApp directly ties Joe Biden to the millions of dollars coming from communist China," Cruz said. "Now, it is possible Hunter Biden was lying, it's possible Joe Biden wasn't next to him. It's possible Joe Biden was not going to inflict official damage on the Chinese if they didn't pay him and his son millions of dollars. That's possible, but you know what, we don't know if it's true or not. Why? Because, according to the whistleblower, they didn't investigate, and they were prohibited from investigating. They were prevented from even asking the question."

"Let me be clear: This, on the face of it, is obstruction of justice," he said. "And if Merrick Garland issued that order, he is the one blocking the investigation, and I think there's real evidence of Merrick Garland being guilty of obstruction of justice."

Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has served in the Senate since 2013, said, "If you had a single Democrat who gave a flying flip about the rule of law, we would have a hearing right now with Merrick Garland in front of us, under oath, asking about this WhatsApp," he said. "We would ask to see every document, we would ask to see every email, we'd ask to see every communication between DOJ and the investigators. We would put the IRS whistleblowers on the stand, under oath to testify about it, and we would confront Merrick Garland with that."

KIRBY ARGUES WITH REPORTER ABOUT PURPORTED HUNTER BIDEN TEXT MESSAGE: 'NOT GOING TO COMMENT FURTHER'

"The chances of the Senate Judiciary Committee doing that are zero, because [chairman] Dick Durbin doesn't care," he added. "No Senate Democrat cares, but the House does, so that is the only hope for investigating this."

If the claims made in the WhatsApp message are accurate, they starkly contradict President Biden's repeated insistence that he had no knowledge of son Hunter's business dealings.

Asked Friday by a reporter whether the WhatsApp message undermines the president's claims that he had no knowledge of his son's overseas activities, National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby replied, "No, and I'm not going to comment further on this."

A Hunter Biden attorney said in a statement Friday, "Any verifiable words or actions of my client, in the midst of a horrible addiction, are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family."

White House Counsel's Office spokesman Ian Sams said, "As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son."

"As we have also said many times before, the Justice Department makes decisions in its criminal investigations independently, and in this case, the White House has not been involved," Sams continued. "As the President has said, he loves his son and is proud of him accepting responsibility for his actions and is proud of what he is doing to rebuild his life."

How the Dobbs decision stunted anti-abortion action in the House GOP

Posted on (Updated by Emily Brooks

The Supreme Court case that eliminated the federal right to obtain an abortion was preceded by years of legislative attempts by congressional Republicans to chip away at those protections.

But a year after the high court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, there is little appetite among Republicans in the House — the only chamber where they control the majority — to take steps to restrict abortion at the national level.

Though House Republicans passed 20-week abortion ban bills three times in the last decade, many of the same abortion opponents behind those proposals now say the issue should be handled at the state level. 

And Republicans in swing districts are loath to spend political capital on a messaging bill that is dead on arrival in a Democratic-controlled Senate — particularly as more and more Americans say they are in favor of increasing abortion access.

“There's political realities in a four-seat majority,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who represents a district that President Biden won in 2020. While he supports some proposed anti-abortion measures in theory, he understands why others do not.

“Some people are very sensitive about it. Though they would agree to it, they're just afraid that it becomes a big issue in the next election,” Bacon said. 

That concern isn’t unfounded. Abortion played a major role in the 2022 midterms, coming in behind only inflation as the issue voters were most concerned about. The liberal side prevailed in each of the five abortion-related referendums on state ballots in November — including in Montana and Kentucky — as well as in a Kansas special election last summer and a Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this year that turned heavily on the issue of abortion.

A Gallup poll conducted in May found record-high support for abortion access.

Meanwhile in the House, Republicans seem to be pulling back on taking even incremental steps against abortion.

A bill to permanently codify and expand the Hyde Amendment, a provision that prohibits certain federal funds from being used on abortion procedures, was included in a list of 12 pieces of legislation House Republicans planned to pass in the first weeks of the new House majority. That bill, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act was given the high bill number of H.R. 7 — symbolic of its importance to the Republican platform.

But it never came to the floor, with opposition from moderate House Republicans being a factor.

One of those is Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), a first-term Biden-district Republican.

“I will continue opposing standalone federal action on limiting taxpayer funding for abortion. The Dobbs decision made clear that it's an issue that should be decided at the state level, and Oregonians recently rejected efforts to limit taxpayer-funded abortion overwhelmingly,” Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said that leaders are “going to keep working to move” the bill, and said Republicans will work to include provisions prohibiting spending on abortion in appropriations bills.

Staff for the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House, released a memo Friday urging Republicans to stand together to pass the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act — noting that it passed with universal GOP support in January 2017, the last time the party held the House majority. 

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has been an outspoken critic of how her party has handled abortion issues, saying in April that Republicans could “lose huge” if they continued trying to enact strict bans, but is a cosponsor of the legislation. 

She said the bill was supposed to get a floor vote last week but was pulled down due to concerns from GOP members in swing seats.

Some members took issue with the bill being “Hyde plus,” including prohibiting qualified health plans under the Affordable Care Act from providing abortion coverage. 

While Mace supports bans on the procedures as long as there are exceptions, she thinks Republicans should put more focus on options such as expanding access to birth control and adoption.

“For me as a woman and as a victim of rape, it's really important that we as Republicans let women know we care about them,” Mace said.

The House did pass two measures related to “pro-life” issues in February: A bill to require care to be given to an infant who survives an abortion procedure (Democrats have argued that a 2002 law already guarantees infants’ legal rights), and a resolution condemning attacks on anti-abortion centers and churches.

And some moderate Republicans think the House should not go much further than that.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), another Republican who represents a district that Biden won, said he does not think there should be more action in the House GOP to implement more abortion restrictions.

“I think that it's a very divisive issue, and we need to start building a bridge on it,” Fitzpatrick said. “I'm a big believer in legislating between the 40-yard lines and eliminating extreme options on all sides.”

That marks a stark change from the abortion politics in Congress over the last decade, when incremental nationwide ban legislation helped gradually build momentum for the anti-abortion cause leading up to the Dobbs decision.

House Republicans passed a 20-week abortion ban when they controlled the House in 2013, 2015 and 2017. Last year, that bill was modified to ban abortions after 15 weeks.

But now, House GOP leaders are distancing themselves from any kind of national abortion ban.

“It works through committee. The Supreme Court has made that decision. It goes to the states, the states will take up that issue,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a press conference in April when asked if Republicans will put forward a national ban on abortion in any form.

Interest in pursuing a national abortion ban also appears low in the Senate GOP.

“Most of our folks are of a mind that, you know, letting states decide is the best course of action,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said. 

But Thune warned that Democrats will define Republicans by the most restrictive bans and will work to guarantee abortion access at the national level — which could push the debate to Congress eventually.

“At some point, there will be a debate here at the national level,” Thune said. “The position I've come behind is the 15-week ban.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he still thinks Republicans should support the 15-week ban proposal he spearheaded last year, calling it a reasonable “national minimum standard.”

But Republicans are long way away from having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that could usher an abortion ban into law.

It's not only vulnerable Republicans veering away from a national abortion ban. Conservative Republicans in solidly red districts also say the issue should be left to the state level. 

“Nobody's bringing up a national ban. Nobody is trying to push that,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said. Donalds said that his read of the Dobbs decision is that “abortion is now to be regulated by the states, as it should have been this entire time — not by the Supreme Court and not by Congress.”

They also worry that being too assertive with anti-abortion messaging could endanger Republicans — and the anti-abortion cause — overall, now that voters have a much heightened awareness of the issue.

“I think going into a ‘24 election, presidential election, you have a lot of lessons learned from the midterms. And I think, collectively, you're seeing the states step up, particularly after Roe v. Wade, making decisions that we for the longest time have advocated for — that this was a states rights issue,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), co-chairwoman of the Pro-Life Caucus.

“But people are very cognizant of where they need to fall in terms of the messaging on this, because we certainly lost seats and had missed opportunity as a result of some pretty aggressive, extreme messaging,” Cammack said.

Mychael Schnell and Al Weaver contributed. 

Graham says Biden impeachment without due process would be ‘dead on arrival’

Posted on (Updated by Jared Gans

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said an effort to impeach President Biden that lacks due process would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate. 

Graham said during a Friday appearance on “The Hill” on NewsNation that Republicans argued that Democrats did not give former President Trump the right to due process during the impeachment proceedings against him in 2019 and 2021, and he does not believe anyone should be impeached without a hearing being held. 

Graham noted that the impeachment against former President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s went through a process that allowed him to defend himself. 

“But what’s being done in the House to go straight to the floor with articles of impeachment — we criticized the Democrats for not giving Trump any due process. I think this is dead on arrival,” he said. 

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) introduced a privileged motion in the House this week to force a vote on impeaching Biden over his handling of federal immigration policy and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the motion caught many of her own colleagues by surprise and did not have support from several notable GOP members in the House and Senate, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). 

Senate Republicans raised questions about the effort, and some said they considered it to be frivolous and not meeting the level required for impeachment. The motion was ultimately referred to the House Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, avoiding the vote for now. 

McCarthy said Boebert’s motion is “one of the most serious things you can do as a member of Congress” and an investigative process needs to occur first to move forward. 

“Throwing something on the floor actually harms the investigation that we’re doing right now,” he said. 

Republicans have been pushing to impeach various members of the Biden administration, including Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has introduced articles against all of them as well as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves. 

Some Republicans warned after Boebert's effort failed that the attempt will give Democrats the ability to paint the GOP as extreme, with one Republican strategist calling Boebert’s effort “frankly stupid.” 

Graham said impeaching any president without “some process in place” is “irresponsible.” 

“It’s important that we follow the process, and if you believe that President Biden has done something this impeachable, take it through the committee, give him a chance to respond, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.

McCarthy seeks to mollify conservatives ahead of federal spending fight

Posted on (Updated by Emily Brooks

With a two-week holiday break starting next week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gathered some of his most vocal conservative critics Friday for a meeting intended to ease the hard-liners’ deficit concerns ahead of the long summer fight over government spending. 

It’s been a rocky few weeks in the House. The Speaker’s conservative critics have been grumbling that he caved too quickly during debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, and they’re seeking concrete assurances that McCarthy will hold a harder line — and demand deeper cuts — in the upcoming partisan battle over funding the government beyond September.

To mollify those gripes, the Speaker summoned a group of at least eight conservatives to his office in the Capitol on Friday afternoon, seeking to convince the skeptics that Republican leaders share their goals when it comes to spending cuts. Afterward, McCarthy characterized the discussion as a sort of primer on the goals GOP leaders aim to achieve in their appropriations bills.

“You have to think differently. We got to start at the beginning,” McCarthy said. “It's walking people through what's in the approps bills now, and what could be as the other ones get marked up. Greater input, greater conversations. And the more knowledge, the better off we are in the better chance we have at passing.”

With lawmakers leaving for a two-week recess on Friday, McCarthy said he did not want members to “just go away,” and that he is setting up more meetings on the matter over the break.

In an indication of the high stakes, some of the conservatives had delayed flights home in order to join Friday’s meeting, according to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who was among them. Higgins acknowledged that GOP leaders face an arduous task in rallying 218 votes behind their spending bills given the party’s slim majority — “The understatement of possibly the decade,” he said — but he also predicted they would meet that goal.

“We're going to find a way to get to 218 on appropriations,” Higgins said. “We are united in that goal.” 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, also came away from the meeting with an optimistic tone. 

“I think there is a plan of action. I don’t know about a resolution, but a plan of action,” Perry said.

Others, though, emphasized the long road ahead in ironing out the details of the spending cuts conservatives are demanding. 

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said a big part of the discussion is “making sure that we're all on the same page” with the appropriations figures, and that members are not operating with “different sets of numbers.” 

Conservatives have accused GOP leaders of using a budget “gimmick” — known as rescissions — to claim they’re setting next year’s spending at last year’s levels, while actually allocating much more. And several of them said they’re not yet satisfied with leadership's response. 

“It’s a very much continued and unresolved question,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said. 

“I think the disagreement right now amongst us [and], you know, our colleagues is they’re using that to help bring up the agency spending,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said of the rescissions after the meeting. “And so my view is no, we shouldn’t be doing that. … The agencies need to justify why they even need the money to begin with. They have not done that.”

The House left Friday for a two-week Independence Day recess after an extended seven-week stretch in session; the debt ceiling legislation forced leaders to cancel a scheduled weeklong recess the week of Memorial Day. 

Tensions flared — and derailed leadership’s hold of the House floor — through the second half of that grueling stretch, forcing McCarthy to stomp out fires.

Eleven members of the House Freedom Caucus and their allies sunk a procedural rule in protest of the proposed cuts in the debt ceiling compromise not being steep enough, shutting down legislative action on the House floor for a week. Moderate Republicans lashed out, with one even proposing working with Democrats to get back control of the floor.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) forced a vote on a resolution to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calf.), which failed last week but then succeeded this week after adjustments in language. And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) forced action on her resolution to impeach Biden over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, angering colleagues and surprising leaders — who then punted on her impeachment articles by working out a vote to send them back to committee.

Conservatives still have major concerns with spending levels in appropriations bills that have started to move through the committee. While they have allowed floor action to continue, they warn that shutting down the floor again remains a possibility.

Yet McCarthy said Friday the House GOP has “been so successful for the last seven weeks.”

As the leaders’ outreach effort ramps up, Republican appropriators have already begun the long process of marking up their 2024 spending bills, with a goal of sending all 12 appropriations bills to the House floor as quickly as possible. 

“I think that what makes the most sense for us strategically is to be able to get these bills, get the numbers as low as we possibly can, and get them out of the House as quick as we can for negotiating purposes,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally who was central to debt ceiling negotiations, told reporters after the meeting. “I think that’s what’s most strategic and in our interest.”

Behind Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Texas), the Appropriations Committee has already marked up roughly half of those spending bills. But Graves emphasized that even those are not set in stone, and GOP leaders are reserving the right to alter those bills as needed to win over potential GOP holdouts — conservatives and moderates alike. 

“The Speaker committed in January to go through regular order. Regular order includes allowing amendments and changes to bills as we move forward,” Graves said. “And look, yeah, Freedom Caucus has ideas on what they want to do. But so do a lot of other people.”

Watch this amazing breakdown of Republican antics on the House floor

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

The last few days have been what Republicans consider busy. Have they solved any issues related to American workers, public safety, or national security? No. They’ve introduced an impeachment resolution against President Joe Biden and voted to censure Rep. Adam Schiff for pursuing the mountain of evidence against the Donald Trump campaign’s many connections to foreign interests and intelligence.

On Friday during the floor debate over Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Biden impeachment resolution, Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern gave it to the Republican Party for about six and a half minutes, calling the current Republican political vengeance efforts unserious. “[Republicans] dishonored this House and dishonored themselves by bringing to the floor a ridiculous censure resolution against Adam Schiff because Donald Trump told them to,” McGovern said. “And today they're dishonoring this House and dishonoring themselves by bringing to the floor a ridiculous impeachment referral resolution against Joe Biden because Donald Trump told them to.”

And then McGovern gave a true distillation of how useless this Republican Party is.

RELATED STORY: Tense—or typical?—moment in House as MTG calls Boebert a 'b----'

“This body has become a place where extreme, outlandish and nutty issues get debated passionately and important ones, not at all” McGovern said, summarizing what the Republican-lead House means these days. To highlight this disconnection between reality and MAGA fiction, McGovern contrasted real work versus MAGA work:

They talk about law and order when their frontrunner, frontrunner for president, has been indicted on federal charges. They talk about respecting law enforcement. Then they come in here and downplay the rioters who came in here on January 6th and beat up cops with fire extinguishers. I don't even know how they look the Capitol police officers in the eye when they walk in this place.  

They talk about how important it is that we follow a good process, yet the Rules Committee was called in late last night, literally at a moment's notice where they deployed emergency procedures so we could refer this measure to a committee. What a spectacular emergency. Truly something that needed to be done immediately. We all know the truth. The real emergency here was that the Georgia wing and the Colorado wing of the MAGA caucus got into a fight right over right over there on the House floor about who gets to impeach the president first.

McGovern added, “They can try to impeach Joe Biden all they want, but all they are doing is impeaching themselves and making a mockery of this place while they're at it.” He went on to call Trump a “cult leader” who would go down as the worst president in U.S. history.

McGovern spent a good amount of time talking about all of the things that should be happening on the House floor and what the Republican Party is choosing to do instead, concluding:

“It is grotesque. It is embarrassing and it is shameful. We aren't we aren't debating matters that help or uplift people. Rather, we're debating garbage to make Trump happy. It's cowardly and it's sickening. What we have here is a joke. Just like the Republican majority, which is clearly going to be a temporary majority. And with that, Mr. Speaker, I reserve my time.”

Amen to that.

YouTube Video

Joining us on "The Downballot" this week is North Carolina Rep. Wiley Nickel, the first member of Congress to appear on the show! Nickel gives us the blow-by-blow of his unlikely victory that saw him flip an extremely competitive seat from red to blue last year, including how he adjusted when a new map gave him a very different district and why highlighting the extremism of his MAGA-flavored opponent was key to his success. A true election nerd, Nickel tells us which precincts he was tracking on election night that let him know he was going to win—and which fellow House freshman is the one you want to rock out with at a concert.

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Speaker McCarthy supports expunging Trump’s impeachments

Posted on by Associated Press

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,” said McCarthy, the Republican from California. “Just as I thought before — that you should expunge it, because it never should have gone through.”

Pressed on his views, McCarthy said he agreed with expunging both of Trump’s impeachments — the abuse of power charges in 2019 over pressing Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on rival Joe Biden and the 2021 charge that Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol as Trump supporters tried to overturn Biden’s election.

In both cases, Trump was acquitted by the Senate after his impeachment by the House. But expunging the charges from his record would be an action he could further tout as vindication as he seeks another term in the White House.

The effort is the latest effort by Trump's allies to rewrite the narrative of the defeated president's tenure in office. And it underscores the pressure McCarthy is under from his right flank.

Just this week, McCarthy beat back a proposal from Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., to impeach President Biden, sending it instead to committees for review.

In explaining his views, McCarthy said the first Trump impeachment, in 2019, should have never happened, conflating it with a separate investigation by the Justice Department into Russian interference into the 2016 election.

As for the 2021 trial that was conducted swiftly in the week after the riot at the Capitol, he said: “The second impeachment had no due process.”

The speaker gave no indication he would move quickly to bring forward the proposals from Greene, R-Ga., and Stefanik, R-N.Y., who is the fourth-ranking GOP leader, for House votes. Pressed if the proposals were a priority, he shifted to listing other GOP goals.

Asked if he had spoken to Trump about expunging the impeachment record, McCarthy said he had not.

Trump, who is campaigning to return to the White House, is the first president in U.S. history to be twice impeached by the House, though he was acquitted by the Senate of all charges.

Democrats have defended their decision to quickly impeach Trump a second time after the mob attack at the Capitol in 2021. They argue that the evidence played out for the world to see as the defeated president rallied his supporters to Washington and encouraged them to march to the Capitol as Congress was certifying Biden's election.

Trump was first impeached in 2019 after it was disclosed that he encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dig up political dirt on then-White House rival Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign — while Trump was withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine as it faced Russia.

McCarthy backs effort to expunge Trump impeachments

Posted on (Updated by Mychael Schnell

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is throwing his weight behind the conservative effort to expunge the two impeachments of former President Trump, saying Trump’s behavior didn't rise to a level that merited either punishment, and he would like to eradicate both votes from history. 

Leaving the Capitol on Friday ahead of a long holiday recess, the Speaker said he supports erasing the pair of impeachments because, he argued, one “was not based on true facts” and the other was “on the basis of no due process.”

“I think it is appropriate, just as I thought before, that you should expunge it because it never should have gone through,” McCarthy told reporters outside his office. He later clarified he supports expunging both Trump impeachments, but he emphasized such resolutions must first go through the committee process.

The Speaker’s endorsement of the expungement push highlights both the tenuous grip McCarthy has on his conference, where conservatives are holding his feet to the fire on numerous policy issues, and the powerful influence Trump retains over the Republican Party more than two years after leaving office. 

More House coverage from The Hill

Behind then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Democrats successfully impeached Trump twice: The first vote, in late 2019, found that Trump abused his power when he threatened to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine unless leaders in Kyiv launched an investigation of his political rivals. The second, in early 2021, found Trump responsible for “incitement of insurrection” for his role in encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In the House, the first impeachment passed without any Republican support. The second was different, and 10 Republicans crossed the aisle to impeach Trump for the Capitol rampage. In both cases, Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate rallied to prevent a conviction.

Just two of the 10 Republicans who supported the second impeachment still serve in the House: Reps. Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and David Valadao (Calif.).

McCarthy's position on the Jan. 6 attack has shifted over time. 

Immediately following the Capitol rampage, McCarthy went to the floor and said Trump bore "responsibility" for the violence, which was carried out by Trump supporters trying to block the certification of his 2020 election defeat. 

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When it became clear the GOP was sticking behind Trump, McCarthy quickly reversed course, visiting Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida a few weeks later. He would go on to say Trump did not "provoke" the riot, and he then orchestrated the expulsion of then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from GOP leadership for her refusal to indulge Trump's lies about his election defeat.

Asked about potentially expunging the punishments in January, the newly-elected Speaker said he would “look at it.”

House GOP Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) launched an effort to expunge Trump’s impeachments on Thursday, unveiling two resolutions that would discard the disciplines. Greene is the sponsor of the measure targeting Trump’s first impeachment, and Stefanik’s name is on the second one.

The practical implications of the resolutions are dubious because they can do nothing to revisit the impeachment votes or eradicate the public’s memory of them. Still, the bills are designed to do both, claiming the expungement will reset the historical record "as if such Articles had never passed."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks during a press conference held by the Republican Study Committee announcing their Fiscal Year 2024 Budget at the Capitol on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.

Earlier this week, before the measures were introduced, Greene said she is hoping to see a vote on the floor for the resolutions “soon.”

The push to expunge Trump’s impeachment is not new on Capitol Hill: In the last Congress, then-Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla), who now serves in the Senate, introduced resolutions to expunge both of the former president’s impeachments. They did not, however, advance in the Democratic-controlled House.

Democrats wasted no time this week attacking the Republicans supporting expungement, accusing them of carrying water for a twice-disgraced former president solely because he remains so powerful among GOP voters. 

“It’s a continuation of Republicans acting as Donald Trump's taxpayer-funded lawyers,” said Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who was a lead attorney for the Democrats during the first impeachment.

“It's telling who's introducing them," he added. "And it's essentially whoever's trying to curry the most favor with Trump.”