Eugene Robinson
For millennia, politicians have sought power in order to shape the future. Not today’s MAGA Republicans, though. They have decided to use their House majority to try to shape, or reshape, the past. Last week, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) introduced resolutions to “expunge” former president Donald Trump’s two impeachments, “as if such Articles of Impeachment had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Incredibly, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) – whose job is to be the adult in the room – said Friday that he supports this initiative, which actual adults can see is ridiculous and obviously futile.
The aim appears to be to allow Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee in next year’s election, to claim that despite the events we all witnessed, he was never impeached at all. That lie can then become part of the fake historical record he sells to his supporters. Trump claims he won the 2020 election “by a lot” (he lost to Joe Biden in both the electoral and the popular votes) but had his victory “stolen” by massive voter fraud (at least 86 judges, including members of the Supreme Court, found this completely untrue). He claims “my economy” was the best in the nation’s history (it wasn’t). He claims he “completed” his border wall (he didn’t). He claims that as president he was respected and feared across the globe (when he boasted at the United Nations that his administration “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” the assembled world leaders laughed at him). Now, if the House does what Greene and Stefanik propose, he will surely claim that his two impeachments simply never happened. Our collective memory must be playing tricks on us. The House of Representatives didn’t really accuse him – twice – of high crimes and misdemeanors. Those hubbubs we dimly recall must have ended in unanimous resolutions praising his rugged good looks and his really big brain.
This notion of impeachment expungement is so laughable that it’s easy to chuckle and guffaw past what’s so serious about it. The biggest threat to our democracy, in my view, is the fact that we no longer agree on even the most basic facts. If some of us believe it’s raining right now and others believe it’s a sunny day, how can we possibly come to the right decision on whether to invest in umbrellas or sunscreen? Now, to flatter Trump’s vanity and help him politically, Greene and Stefanik want to create a kind of alternate-universe timeline in which President Donald the Great was never really impeached – because, considering his Greatness, how could he have been? The right-wing media echo chamber will treat the expungement as legitimate, which would make the impeachments somehow illegitimate. And the nation’s information gap, already a canyon, will further widen. For the record, expunging a presidential impeachment is not a thing. It has never been attempted because it makes no sense. Both of Trump’s House impeachments led to trials in the Senate, as the Constitution instructs. Is the Senate supposed to pretend that those trials, which ended in acquittals, never happened? What about the pages in the Congressional Record that chronicle the impeachment proceedings? Would they be ripped out and destroyed? Sent to Mar-a-Lago for Trump to hoard in one of his cardboard boxes, with his golf shirts and his newspaper clippings? Trump was impeached in December 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The key piece of evidence was a record of a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump appeared to condition the release of US military aid to Ukraine on an announcement by Ukrainian officials that they were investigating Biden for alleged corruption.
Greene’s resolution would expunge that impeachment based on the newly revealed FBI document reporting an informant’s claim of rumored corruption by Biden. Greene’s terse draft does not mention that these allegations were examined by Trump’s own Justice Department and judged not credible enough to investigate. Trump was impeached again in January 2021 for incitement of insurrection, based on his role in instigating the bloody MAGA attempted putsch at the Capitol earlier that month. Stefanik’s resolution to expunge this second impeachment flirts with, and at times seems to accept, Trump’s “big lie” about the “stolen” election. At one point, for example, Stefanik notes that Trump was the only incumbent president since Grover Cleveland to increase his vote total from his first election yet “seemingly still not [win] reelection.” Those words are not seemingly but actually, and pathetically, craven. Voters should expunge this useless GOP majority. In 2024, let’s elect a Congress that wants to work, not one that only wants to posture.
The Washington Post
