How Congress Expels a Member — And Why It Almost Never Happens

Short answer: Congress expels a member by a two-thirds vote of that member’s own chamber — the House votes on representatives, the Senate votes on senators, and no court, president, prosecutor, or voter back home can do it for them. In more than two centuries, the Senate has expelled 15 members and the House just 6. Understanding how Congress expels a member reveals something uncomfortable about American self-government: the sharpest tool for policing a legislature is the one its own members are least willing to pick up.

What does the Constitution actually say about expelling a member?

Almost nothing, which is the point. Article I, Section 5 gives each chamber the power to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.” That is the whole grant. No definition of disorderly behavior, no required finding of guilt, no standard of evidence, no appeal. A chamber does not need a conviction, an indictment, or even a completed investigation.

The framers made a deliberate trade. Rather than let presidents, judges, or rival chambers purge a legislature, they handed each house a scalpel and trusted it to operate on itself. That protects legislative independence. It also means the only people who can remove a sitting member of Congress are the colleagues who sit beside him and need his vote next Tuesday.

How Congress Expels a Member: What the Process Looks Like

There is no single statute laying out the steps, but in practice the path runs roughly like this:

1. A trigger. A criminal indictment, a press investigation, an outside referral, or a complaint from another member.
2. An ethics investigation. The House Committee on Ethics or the Senate Select Committee on Ethics takes the case. These are the only evenly split committees in Congress, which is both their strength and the reason they often deadlock. They can subpoena records, interview witnesses, and issue a public report recommending action.
3. A resolution. Any member can introduce a resolution of expulsion, and because it is treated as a question of privilege, it can be forced to the floor without leadership’s blessing.
4. Debate. The accused member is traditionally given the floor to answer the charges.
5. The vote. Two-thirds of those present and voting. A simple majority is not enough; a majority gets you censure, not removal.
6. Immediate effect. If the resolution passes, the member is out that day and the seat is vacant. There is no grace period and no judicial review.

Why has Congress removed so few of its own?

The Senate’s 15 expulsions are badly lopsided: 14 of them came in 1861 and 1862, aimed at senators who sided with the Confederacy. Strip out the Civil War and the Senate has expelled exactly one man in its entire history, William Blount, in 1797. The House has expelled six: three in 1861 for the same wartime reason, then Michael Myers in 1980 after the Abscam bribery sting, James Traficant in 2002, and George Santos in 2023.

Four forces hold the number down. Two-thirds is an enormous bar in a narrowly divided chamber. Expulsion overrides a decision voters already made. Every expulsion builds precedent that could be aimed at the next member, and nobody wants to sharpen a blade they may someday face. Most importantly, members facing certain expulsion usually resign first — Bob Packwood in 1995 and Harrison Williams in 1982 both stepped down rather than lose a floor vote.

That last point is the real mechanism. Expulsion is less a punishment than a threat. The formal power is exercised rarely because the informal power works.

What is the difference between expulsion, censure, and refusing to seat someone?

Censure is a formal condemnation passed by simple majority. The member keeps the seat, though leadership often strips committee assignments separately. A reprimand is a milder version. Neither removes anyone.

Exclusion is different and largely foreclosed. In Powell v. McCormack (1969), the Supreme Court held that a chamber cannot refuse to seat a duly elected member who meets the Constitution’s three qualifications — age, citizenship, and inhabitancy in the state. The practical result: Congress must seat a member-elect first, then expel by two-thirds if it wants him gone. The majority-vote shortcut does not exist.

What happens to the seat after a member is expelled?

This is where expulsion gets strategically interesting. A vacant House seat can be filled only by a special election; the governor issues a writ, and the district goes unrepresented for weeks or months. A vacant Senate seat follows the Seventeenth Amendment, which lets a state legislature authorize the governor to appoint a temporary replacement until an election is held.

So expelling a representative subtracts a vote from the chamber. Expelling a senator can hand a governor the power to install one. Anyone counting votes understands that asymmetry, and it shapes how expulsion resolutions are timed and argued far more than the public ever hears.

Why does a procedural rule like this belong in a thriller?

Because the real vulnerabilities in American government are almost never the ones fiction reaches for. Thrillers love the assassin and the tank in the street. The actual pressure points are quieter: a two-thirds threshold, a governor’s appointment power, an evenly split committee that can deadlock a scandal into irrelevance. Those are the hinges the Bull Moose books are built around.

If that is the kind of story you want, start with the free prequel, The Senate Deception, which puts a single senator in exactly that kind of procedural vise. From there, What It Takes to Kill a Bull Moose opens the series proper, and the reading order page lays out where each book falls.

The lesson in the expulsion numbers is not that Congress is lawless. It is that a self-policing body acts only when enough of its members decide the cost of doing nothing is higher than the cost of acting — a decision made by human beings under pressure, which is to say, always a story.

Further reading: U.S. senators expelled or censured (Wikipedia)

Frequently asked questions

How many votes does it take to expel a member of Congress? Two-thirds of the members present and voting in that member’s own chamber. At full attendance that is 290 of 435 in the House and 67 of 100 in the Senate. The other chamber has no vote and no role whatsoever.

Can a member of Congress be expelled for conduct before taking office? Yes. Both chambers have treated the expulsion power as reaching conduct that predates a member’s service, and the Constitution sets no time limit on it. Some members argue the voters should be left to judge pre-office conduct, but that is a prudential argument, not a legal bar, and no court reviews the chamber’s judgment.

Can an expelled member of Congress run for office again? Expulsion carries no disqualification from future office. An expelled member can run again immediately, and voters are free to send him back, unless he is separately disqualified by some other provision of law or the Constitution.

Want a political thriller you can’t put down? Claim your free copy of The Senate Deception, the award-winning prequel to the Bull Moose series — and join 3,000+ readers who never miss a release.

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About the author: Michael Fedor is the award-winning author of the Bull Moose political thriller series. Drawing on 20 years inside politics and campaigns, he writes pulse-pounding fiction about power, democracy, and the fragile machinery of the republic.