Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has introduced a House resolution seeking to formally erase both impeachments of President Donald Trump, a move with no precedent in American history and one that forces a direct confrontation over whether the House will reckon with what Issa calls "maliciously false" accusations baked into the congressional record.
The resolution, designated H.Res.1211, was referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It declares that the impeachment articles approved by the House in 2019 and 2021 should be "expunged as if such Article had never passed the full House of Representatives," Fox News Digital reported.
More than 20 House Republicans have already signed on as cosponsors, and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has thrown his weight behind the effort, a signal that this time, unlike two previous failed attempts, the resolution may actually get a hearing.
Issa framed the resolution as a matter of basic fairness. The Constitution, he told Fox News Digital, offers no remedy for a wrongful impeachment the way the legal system offers remedies for wrongful indictments.
"An impeachment is basically an indictment and it's an indictment that you can't really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question."
That question sits at the heart of H.Res.1211. Issa argued that newly available evidence, including declassified intelligence material, has fundamentally changed the picture surrounding both impeachment proceedings. He said the resolution aims to "make sure that the facts and the reality that there was misconduct in the process gets a hearing."
On the first impeachment, approved in 2019, the resolution contends the inquiry rested on unreliable and politically biased information. It points to newly declassified material that Issa says undermines the credibility of the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint triggered the entire affair. The resolution argues the whistleblower lacked firsthand knowledge, received assistance from officials with alleged political bias, and that House investigators mishandled or misrepresented evidence while denying Trump the chance to confront his accusers.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard bolstered that argument earlier this year when she announced the declassification of documents she described as revealing a "coordinated effort" within the intelligence community "to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019."
Democrats have long used impeachment as a political tool against this administration. Nancy Pelosi herself refused to rule out pursuing impeachment again if Democrats reclaimed the House, a posture that tells you everything about how the minority party views the process.
The resolution's case against the 2021 impeachment is, if anything, more procedurally damning. The House moved from introduction to passage in just two days. No fact witnesses testified. No extended investigation took place. A brief committee hearing featured constitutional experts, but the resolution argues the breakneck timeline denied Trump basic due process.
Issa did not hold back about the substance of that charge, either.
"They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it's false."
He said previous efforts to expunge the impeachments, resolutions introduced in 2022 and 2023, failed because they "didn't have what we have." Those earlier measures never received hearings, markups, or floor votes, and they died quietly at the end of the 118th Congress.
What's different now, Issa argued, is "the compelling case to say the misconduct of the accusation is now what we're going to have on trial rather than the president because he was impeached with information that the very people who brought it knew was wrong."
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, whose committee now holds the resolution, offered a blunt endorsement. Jordan told Fox News Digital that "Democrats weaponized impeachment against President Trump with politically motivated charges."
"We applaud Chairman Issa for leading the fight to expunge this sham from the record."
Jordan's support matters. As chairman of the committee where H.Res.1211 now sits, he has the procedural authority to schedule hearings and move the resolution forward, something that never happened under prior leadership when similar measures were introduced.
The broader pattern of Democrats wielding impeachment as a weapon extends well beyond Trump himself. House Democrats have introduced impeachment articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and individual members have filed their own versions targeting administration officials over policy disagreements, a trend that cheapens a constitutional mechanism designed for genuine high crimes.
The resolution has drawn a sizable roster of initial backers. Cosponsors listed on the congressional record include Claudia Tenney, Scott Fitzgerald, Russell Fry, Mark Alford, Tim Burchett, Tom McClintock, David J. Taylor, Harriet Hageman, Rick Allen, Rich McCormick, Michael Rulli, Mary Miller, Mike Collins, Glenn Grothman, Jimmy Patronis, Tracey Mann, Tim Walberg, John Rose, Joe Wilson, David Rouzer, Diana Harshbarger, and Ronny Jackson.
That list spans the conference, from committee chairs to backbenchers, from longtime members to freshmen. It suggests the appetite for this fight is not confined to any single faction of House Republicans.
A source close to Issa's office told Fox News Digital the resolution "reflects so poorly on the House" and "represents an example of what's gone wrong in the Capitol and in Washington." The framing is deliberate: this is not just about vindicating Trump, but about restoring institutional credibility after what Issa describes as a process that "broke every House rule."
Meanwhile, the impeachment weapon keeps getting passed around. One House Democrat filed separate impeachment articles against Hegseth over the Iran conflict, underscoring how routine the once-extraordinary tool has become in the hands of the minority party.
Some legal scholars have questioned whether the House possesses the constitutional authority to expunge a prior impeachment. The Constitution spells out the impeachment power but says nothing about undoing one after the fact. Issa acknowledged that gap directly.
"The fact is that the Constitution doesn't spell out what to do when you've wrongfully indicted somebody."
His answer is straightforward: the House voted to impeach, so the House can vote to reverse it. Whether that theory survives scrutiny from constitutional lawyers on both sides remains an open question, but Issa is betting that the political and evidentiary case is strong enough to carry the day on the floor.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment. No response was reported.
Issa cast the effort in terms any newspaper reader would understand, the obligation to correct the record with the same prominence given to the original accusation.
"When you've been falsely accused, whether it's days, weeks, months or years later, somebody should be just as interested in printing that retraction on the front page as they were in putting the original charge on the front page. And that's what we're trying to achieve, is to have the legitimate retraction receive at least some semblance of the same attention as the false accusations did."
The political context makes the stakes clear. Democrats have spent years treating impeachment not as a constitutional last resort but as a messaging vehicle, a pattern Trump himself has noted when questioning whether their own leaders should face similar accountability for reckless rhetoric about the Supreme Court.
The resolution now sits with Jordan's Judiciary Committee. Whether it gets a hearing, a markup, and ultimately a floor vote depends on leadership's willingness to spend political capital on a fight that will draw fierce opposition from Democrats and skepticism from some legal commentators.
But the cosponsor list, Jordan's public backing, and the declassified intelligence material give this effort more momentum than its predecessors ever had. Issa himself said the goal is to force a public reckoning.
"Our goal is to show that it's false and it was maliciously false and, as a result, it should no longer stand as a legitimate accusation."
The 2022 and 2023 resolutions vanished without a trace. H.Res.1211 arrives with a chairman's endorsement, over twenty cosponsors, and declassified evidence its sponsors say changes the calculus entirely. The question is no longer whether Republicans want to fight this battle. It's whether they'll finish it.
If the House can impeach a president in two days without fact witnesses, it can certainly take the time to examine whether it should have.
