Congress Is in Recess, House Republicans Want to Expunge Impeachments, and a Busy July Is Coming
Jason Pye - Director, Rule of Law Initiatives
Congress is in a two-week recess: The Senate will return on Monday, July 10, while the House comes back on Tuesday, July 11. Since they’re in recess, Point of Order will take a break next week. I’ll spend my Independence Day doing my annual routine of watching 1776 and John Adams. (Yes, Emily, we can watch Hamilton, too, if we must.)
Here’s what’s on tap when Congress gets back: On the Senate side, expect more work on nominations, but there are rumblings of, you know, actual legislating on several fronts, including the SAFE Banking Act, S. 1323, or some variation of it. Of course, it remains to be seen how much of this can actually move in a very closely divided Senate. Over in the House, we’ve heard that appropriations bills are likely to move in July, as well as the tax cut bills, the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act, H.R. 3936, and the Small Business Jobs Act, H.R. 3937.
House Republicans want to expunge Trump’s impeachment: Sigh. Obviously, this effort may ultimately wither on the vine because there are several Republicans who don’t want to take this vote because it could hurt them in their districts, but that’s not stopping the effort. Some House Republicans are floating the idea of expunging former President Trump’s impeachments via H.Res. 547 and H.Res. 548. The notion, particularly related to the impeachment for the January 6 attack on the Capitol, is infuriating. Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA), who served as a manager during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, compared the effort to the “actions by Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s prescient 1984.” He adds, “As an institution, the House of Representatives was deemed so important by the drafters of our Constitution, that its description in that document precedes that of all the other components of the federal government. To now have members of that body acting as modern-day Winston Smiths is disconcerting in the extreme, even if the measures fail to win majority votes.”
For those wondering: There’s no precedent for expunging an impeachment. The closest thing is the expungement of President Andrew Jackson’s censure for vetoing the re-charter of the Bank of the United States. The Senate censured Jackson in March 1834. The censure was expunged in January 1837. Obviously, censure is very different from impeachment, to say nothing of the fact that the Senate conducted trials for the Trump impeachments. Like, y’all, this scheme is stupid partisan hackery.
Oh, and House conservatives really want to impeach Biden: If you were asking me, I’d say that the first impeachment of Trump took away from the sobering importance of the second one after January 6. Impeachment is now weaponized, with some even flippantly comparing it to “dessert.” Take the effort by far-right conservatives to impeach President Biden. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) introduced H.Res. 503 and made a privileged motion for consideration. House Republican leaders had the motion tabled via a procedural move, H.Res. 529, on a party-line vote.
On other fronts, we’re watching the FAIR Act: As I mentioned last week, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously marked up the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act, H.R. 1525. We’re keeping an eye on this bill and hoping that it hits the floor on suspension in July. For my friends on the Hill who aren’t familiar with this issue, please check out the issue brief I wrote in 2019, along with my then-colleagues, Josh Withrow and Luke Hogg.