(TheConservativeTimes.org) – Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has seemingly backpedaled on his initial statement saying that he was personally backing the idea of expunging former President Donald Trump’s two impeachments from the official journal of the House of Representatives.
Politico first reported that McCarthy made a “secret promise” to Donald Trump to expunge his impeachments from the House record. However, McCarthy has since disputed Politico’s reporting, saying that the possible expungement should “go through committee like anything else.”
According to CNN, multiple House GOP leadership have called the effort to erase Donald Trump’s impeachment votes a “fool’s errand,” and that there are not enough votes in the House to pass it. One senior GOP member told Politico that if an expungement were to go to the House floor and fail, it would look like a third impeachment due to some Republicans voting against it.
McCarthy had previously been in hot water with Trump after he said in an interview with CNBC that he didn’t think Trump would be the best presidential candidate. He then promptly apologized to Trump afterward after receiving massive backlash from Trump supporters, as well as Trump himself.
While the expungement of Trump’s two impeachments would allow the House to adopt the position to act as if the impeachments had never happened, the votes would not undo them, and they still would appear in the overall congressional record.
The Constitution allows each house to keep a journal of its proceedings, and each house can adopt whatever rules it finds necessary regarding what gets put into the journal.
The news comes as two of Trump’s staunchest allies in the House, Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced resolutions to expunge both of Trump’s impeachments. One resolution expunges his first impeachment from 2019. The other resolution targets his second impeachment from 2021, in which Trump was accused of inciting the January 6 Capitol riots that stemmed from accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
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