Rep. Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat on his way out of Congress, introduced 26 articles of impeachment against President Trump on Thursday, a sweeping political gesture he conceded has no realistic chance of advancing.
Cohen filed the articles citing what he described as multiple abuses of power, violations of the oath of office, corrupt use of the pardon power, and emoluments clause violations, WREG reported. The list reads like a catalogue of every grievance the Democratic minority has lodged against the administration since January 2025, from tariff policy and military deployments to the renaming of public buildings and the demolition of the White House East Wing.
Cohen, who represents Tennessee's 9th Congressional District and is retiring from the seat, did not pretend the effort would succeed. He told Nexstar plainly that the articles "won't go anywhere" in a Republican-controlled House. His stated purpose was symbolic: sending a message, not removing a president.
The sheer volume of the filing is itself a tell. Twenty-six articles span nearly every policy flashpoint of the past two years. Among them: "Undermining Democracy, Sowing Doubt in Elections," "Abuse of Power, Waging War on Iran Without Congressional Approval," "Deploying Military Forces Against United States Cities," and "Disregard of Courts, The Alien Enemies Act and the Case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia."
Other articles target the administration's handling of birthright citizenship, the cancellation of federal grants to states, loyalty tests for federal employees, the mass termination of inspectors general, and the use of emergency powers to impose tariffs. Cohen also included an article accusing the president of "Coercing CBS and ABC to Change Editorial Content" and another alleging "Political Prosecutions of Comey, James, and Schiff."
The source reporting does not identify a single co-sponsor. No other House member is named as joining the effort. That silence speaks for itself.
Cohen called Trump "the most impeachable president our country has ever endured", a characterization that says more about the congressman's political posture than about any legal standard. Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism, not a superlative contest, and Cohen's own admission that the articles will die on arrival undercuts the gravity of the charge.
This is not Cohen's first attempt. He introduced articles of impeachment against Trump back in 2017, citing the president's response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. At the time, Cohen declared that Trump had "failed the presidential test of moral leadership" and that "no moral president would ever shy away from outright condemning hate, intolerance, and bigotry," as the Washington Free Beacon reported.
That effort went nowhere. Cohen was the second Democrat to file impeachment articles during Trump's first term; Rep. Brad Sherman of California had beaten him to it in July 2017 over alleged obstruction of justice tied to the Russia investigation. The Democratic caucus at large showed little appetite for the fight at the time.
By the time another impeachment resolution reached the full House, the numbers told the story. Fox News reported that a resolution to introduce articles of impeachment was tabled by a vote of 332 to 95, with 137 Democrats voting to shelve it. Rep. Al Green of Texas, who had made three prior attempts to force the issue, joined Cohen in vowing to keep trying. Cohen told reporters at the time that he expected to file again "in the fall," depending on what he called Trump's "additional, further impeachable behavior."
That pattern, file, fail, promise to try again, has defined the Democratic impeachment push for nearly a decade. The actors rotate, the article counts grow, and the outcome stays fixed.
The breadth of Cohen's 26 articles invites a question his own party's strategists have raised before. National Review noted that during the first Trump term, Democrats listed as many as 89 different reasons to justify impeachment, according to research by Grabien. Commentators across the political spectrum warned that a scattershot approach risked making the process look partisan rather than principled.
Journalist Elizabeth Drew cautioned that Democrats were "risking making their target too narrow and moving too fast, implicitly bestowing approval on other presidential acts that amount to a long train of abuses of power." From the left, Mehdi Hasan argued the opposite problem: that impeaching Trump "only over his interactions with the president of Ukraine would effectively give Trump a clean bill of health on everything else."
Cohen's 2026 filing solves neither dilemma. It throws everything at the wall, from the Department of Education to the design of national currency, and dares anyone to take it seriously. The congressman himself does not seem to.
Cohen's move fits a broader pattern among Democratic members who have kept impeachment talk alive even from the minority. House Democratic leadership has at various points declined to rule out impeachment proceedings should Democrats regain the majority, and rank-and-file members have signaled readiness to pursue that path. But signaling and legislating are different things, and minority-party impeachment articles are a press release dressed in constitutional clothing.
Cohen is retiring. He will not be in Congress to see whether any future majority picks up his cause. The 26 articles he filed Thursday will not receive a committee hearing, a floor vote, or a serious procedural path of any kind, and he said as much before the ink was dry.
Impeachment is the most serious remedy the Constitution provides for presidential misconduct. It requires evidence weighed by the full House and a trial conducted by the Senate. What it does not require, and what it was never designed to be, is a farewell statement from a departing backbencher.
The impeachment mechanism has seen heavy use in recent congressional sessions. Articles have been filed against cabinet officials over war-powers disputes, and multiple senators have renewed impeachment pushes tied to specific policy disagreements. The tool is becoming routine, which is another way of saying it is losing its weight.
Cohen's own words frame the effort honestly enough. He knows the articles will fail. He filed them anyway. That tells you everything about what this was, and what it was not.
When a congressman admits his own impeachment filing is dead on arrival, the rest of us are entitled to take him at his word.
