President Donald Trump was officially acquitted in the United States third-ever impeachment trial on Tuesday by a decisive vote.
Still, that’s not enough for some conservative lawmakers. House Minority Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and some political allies have a plan to erase the history of Trump’s impeachment trial — at least symbolically.
After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. bragged this week that Trump’s impeachment “will last forever,” House Republicans countered with a plan to formally “delete” the impeachment from official government records.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Friday that Republicans can expunge the impeachment records if they win back control of 18 seats in the House of Representatives in the November election.
“We can send a loud message when we come back in: This was a political, partisan effort,” Roy said. “We can do that the first day and then get busy doing the job [the] American people want us to do: fight to get healthcare prices down and secure the border and the stuff they talk about.”
The expungement plan was originally proposed by McCarthy, who told The New York Post he doesn’t think impeachment should remain in the official U.S. records.
“This is the fastest, weakest, most political impeachment in history,” McCarthy said in an interview Wednesday. “I don’t think it should stay on the books.”
The idea quickly caught on among conservative commentators and activists.
Most notably, popular Fox News star Sean Hannity implored viewers on Thursday to “take back control” and vote Republican to end the “witch hunt.”
“If you want all of this to end, I have an answer,” Hannity told viewers. “When you vote for Donald Trump, you have all the power.”
“You can also give the House back to the Republican Party … a Republican majority for the president,” he said. “You can vote for Republican Senators in your state while you are voting for President Trump. Then, the witch hunt will then stop and the country will move forward.”
The idea of expunging Trump’s impeachment record has been done in the past, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-T.X., told The Post. “There is precedent for [expunging records] in a later Congress,” Gohmert said, citing the expungement of a censure vote of former President Andrew Jackson in 1837.
Gohmert said he’s convinced Republicans would back the plan if they regain control of the House in 2020.
“The president is there and I think ultimately with the things that are going to be coming out in the months ahead, it will be all the more appropriate. More and more people will see that,” Gohmert told The Post. “So then I think by next year it will be an appropriate thing to file and do.”
James Gardner, a law professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said the act would only be symbolic.
“There’s nothing in the Constitution that provides for a procedure of expungement,” Gardner told The Independent. “It would be of no significance. Certainly of no legal significance. It might be of political significance.”
Even symbolically, the act would be important for Republicans, Roy said.
Pelosi wants an “asterisks” next to Trump’s name in the history books. Roy said that’s unacceptable.
“I think the scarlet letter that Speaker Pelosi so desperately wanted to tag to President Trump that is going to be tagged to her, and to Democrats who really failed to do the work of the American people,” Roy told Fox News. “Instead [they] were so caught up in hatred of the president that they were wasting the time of the American people, instead of doing the work that they sent us here to do.”
ANALYSIS: Behind the scenes, a historic political shake-up could be happening