On ‘expunging’ Trump’s impeachments, McCarthy is stuck in a bind

Just two days after his first Senate impeachment trial wrapped up, Donald Trump broached the subject of invalidating what had happened. “Should they expunge the impeachment in the House?” Trump asked during a brief Q&A with reporters. “They should because it was a hoax.”

A handful of Republican lawmakers pushed the idea in the last Congress — those efforts were ignored — but as the current Congress got underway, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he was willing to take a look at the idea.

About a month ago, the outlandish idea started to actually gain traction: Two prominent House Republicans — GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene — introduced parallel resolutions to “expunge” the former president’s impeachments, and a few days later, McCarthy surprised many by endorsing the gambit. “I think it is appropriate,” the House speaker told reporters. “Just as I thought before — that you should expunge it, because it never should have gone through.”

As The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson summarized well, “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.”

A new Politico report, however, contextualizes matters in an interesting and unexpected way.

It was also about a month ago when McCarthy, in a brief moment of unplanned candor, publicly questioned whether Trump would be his party’s “strongest” choice for the 2024 presidential race. According to Politico’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the former president responded to the slight by demanding an immediate endorsement from the House speaker.

McCarthy wasn’t prepared to do that, so he tried to placate Trump with something else:

[T]he House GOP leader — who has felt compelled to stay neutral during the primary so as to not box in his own members — wasn’t ready to do that. Instead, to calm Trump, McCarthy made him a promise, according to a source close to Trump and familiar with the conversation: The House would vote to expunge the two impeachments against the former president, he told Trump. And — as McCarthy would communicate through aides later that same day — they would do so before August recess.

In other words, the House speaker accidentally told the truth, infuriated the former president, panicked, and reportedly struck a deal with Trump to prevent the fire he accidentally started from spreading.

It was, however, a temporary fix — and it’s not at all clear what McCarthy can do about it now.

If the House Republican honors the apparent promise he made to Trump, trouble will soon follow: Plenty of GOP members from competitive districts aren’t eager to cast votes on this, and they’re counting on McCarthy not to force them into a no-win scenario: Either they side with far-right partisans, which their constituents won’t like, or they face the wrath of their party’s rabid base.

Similarly, if McCarthy moves forward with the “expungement” gambit, but he doesn’t have the votes to pass the measures, Team Trump will be apoplectic, and existing intra-party divisions will quickly become vastly worse.

So the smart move would be to let this idea quietly go away? Yes, but as Politico’s report added, a certain someone doesn’t care whether the move is smart or not.

Regardless of its likelihood of passage, Trump world plans to hold McCarthy to account on his promise. While the former president knows he is unable to stop the myriad indictments expected to come his way, he believes the House has the power to erase the stain of impeachment from his name. That vote, in fact, could become even more important to him given that special counsel Jack Smith appears ready to criminally charge Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

The article added that the former president brings up the “expungement” idea “in every call he has with McCarthy.”

This no doubt frustrates the House speaker, but he’s in a bind of his own making.