The House votes 376 to 30 to expel Michael Myers; no member has left this way since the Civil War
The House had not expelled a single member since the Civil War, when it threw out lawmakers for siding with the Confederacy. On October 2, 1980, it broke that streak, voting 376 to 30 to remove Pennsylvania Democrat Michael "Ozzie" Myers. The vote followed his conviction in the FBI's Abscam sting, built on a videotape of Myers pocketing $50,000 from undercover agents. He became the first House member expelled in 114 years, and only the fourth in the chamber's history.
Expulsion is the Constitution's harshest internal remedy, and the House had used it so rarely that most members in 1980 had never seen it invoked. Myers's case became the modern precedent cited whenever later Congresses weighed expelling a convicted member before an election could remove them.
QHow many times had the House expelled a member before Myers?
Only three times in the chamber's entire history, and all three happened within weeks of each other during the Civil War in 1861, when Representatives John B. Clark, John W. Reid, and Henry C. Burnett were thrown out for taking up arms against the Union. Between that purge and Myers's removal in 1980, no member was expelled no matter what scandal or conviction followed — censure and resignation were the tools the House reached for instead. Myers's expulsion was the fourth in American history and the first not tied to the Confederacy.
QWhat happened to the 30 House members who voted against expelling Myers?
The 30 no votes were not a defense of Myers's conduct so much as a fight over precedent: several members argued expulsion should wait until a convicted member's appeals were exhausted, since Myers was still appealing his Abscam conviction when the House voted. Pennsylvania's own delegation split on the question. The dissenters lost, 376 to 30. Later expulsion cases would cite Myers's as precedent for removing members regardless of pending appeals.
QWhat did Myers do for a living after prison, before his second arrest decades later?
Myers opened his own political consulting firm after his release, trading on the same Philadelphia machine connections that had gotten him into Congress in the first place. He spent years working campaigns from the outside rather than running for office again. That consulting work eventually looped back into the ballot-stuffing conspiracy prosecutors charged him with in 2020, built on the same ward-level connections he had cultivated for decades.
