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Democratic Congresswoman Announces Impeachment Effort Against Kristi Noem
Democratic Rep. Robin Kelly announced on Wednesday plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, following a deadly shooting involving immigration officers in Minneapolis earlier in the day.
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Impeachments without the two-thirds Senate margin needed to convict are not only empty political gesture, but they often backfire, since both impeachments and Senate trials happen largely along party lines. They backfire because every time an acquittal happens, the accused is told, in no uncertain terms, that they can pretty much do what they want as long as just one-third of the Senate has their back. Setting aside Trump, we saw this in Texas when attorney general Ken Paxton, who has had federal felony indictments hanging over his head for a decade now, was acquitted by the Republican-majority Texas Senate along party lines of misappropriating campaign funds to cheat on his wife, despite his impeachment in the Texas House being bipartisan. It pretty much gave Paxton license to even worse abuses of his power, and he has taken those licenses knowing that nothing will ever be done about it. He's now running to unseat John Cornyn in the Senate.
That's one of the serious flaws of presidential republics. It should never have required anything more than a simple no-confidence vote in the House of Representatives to be able to fire any member of the executive branch, including the president. Impeachment is a mechanism that exists in the U.K. government, but it hasn't been utilized in centuries because it is considered antiquated and because the issue can be addressed by holding a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister's government. Yet this elaborate, long-shot political process is the only way to effectively reprimand the combined heads of state/government in almost every country in the Americas except Commonwealth realms, as well as Asian nations like Korea and the Philippines. Korea recently had a near-miss with Yoon, and they were almost unable to do anything about him because his own party was backing him up. Filipino vice-president Sara Duterte has been impeached, but no impeachment trial has been held by the Filipino Senate, and so she remains in office in a tense standoff with Filipino president Bongbong Marcos, whose own regime is being propped up by billions of dollars worth of aid from the Trump administration.
In the entire history of the U.S., only eight federal officials have ever been successfully convicted in an impeachment trial. All of them were federal judges at the trial level. Never has a member of the executive branch ever been successfully impeached and convicted at the federal level, and only one Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached, Samuel Chase, whose impeachment was largely engineered by Thomas Jefferson to weaken the judiciary (he was acquitted).
21 members of Congress have been expelled by the Houses of Congress of which they were members. The most recent of those, George Santos, was pardoned by Trump and released after serving in prison for just three months.
Interestingly, my home state did successfully impeach, convict, and remove a sitting governor, Evan Meacham, for massive corruption. But the last part of an impeachment conviction is a vote to bar the offender from ever holding political office again, and even with Meacham, that vote still failed.
Last edited by SanAndreasX - on 11 January 2026
