It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that Roy Moore will be elected to the Senate—or, perhaps, endure as the Republican nominee for the seat once held by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions. But in the event that Judge Moore wins his election, it is interesting to note that more than a few Republican senators have already said that they would vote to expel him from the Senate.
Expulsion from either chamber of Congress, is a very rare event. Indeed, no senator has been formally expelled from the world’s greatest deliberative body since the Civil War, when a bumper crop of Confederates were penalized. A certain number of senators have chosen to resign once expulsion or censure proceedings were initiated: The last case was Bob Packwood of Oregon (1995), whose transgressions bore some resemblance to Roy Moore’s. But my guess is that the more probable outcome would be a movement to prevent Moore from taking his seat.
There is ample precedent for that, and some interesting history.
In recent times, two members of the House of Representatives have been expelled: Michael Myers (1980), a Democratic shakedown artist from Philadelphia famous for his FBI-recorded assertion that, in politics, “money talks, bulls—t walks,” and James Traficant (2002) of Ohio, another corrupt Democrat now largely remembered for his gothic toupee. But exactly 50 years ago this past January, a Democratic member of the House of some genuine significance, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, was stripped of his committee chairmanship and prevented from taking his seat after he had been re-elected to a 12th term in 1966.
There is a poignant photograph of Powell standing at the bar of the House on opening day, arms folded and leaning over the railing onto the floor he couldn’t trespass. Powell was black, and all the seated House members with their backs turned were white (and men, for that matter). But pictures can be deceiving: Race had nothing to do with Powell’s troubles.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a figure very nearly from fiction as much as politics. The son of a popular Baptist preacher in Harlem, he was also a clergyman and civil-rights activist and, ultimately, succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1938. But there was another side to him: Handsome, stylish, and aware of it, with a pencil-thin moustache and tousled hair, Powell was an entertaining orator and indefatigable ladies’ man, married for a time to the jazz pianist Hazel Scott. Elected to Congress toward the end of World War II, Powell was the most prominent black Democrat in his day and a loyal party man. Thanks to seniority, he became chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in the early 1960s, and as he liked to recount, shepherded much Great Society legislation through Congress.
But the longtime internal conflict between Good Powell and Bad Powell became unbalanced, and by 1966, rumors about his sharp financial practices and misuse of committee funds—not to mention extended sojourns on his houseboat off the island of Bimini, lavishly chronicled in the press —became allegations and accusations. Added to this was a substantial slander judgment in New York, which he refused to pay. By the time the House reconvened, in January 1967, Powell had become anathema to his fellow Democrats—and in any case, was spending most of his time in the Caribbean, partly for recreational purposes and partly to avoid the jurisdiction of the courts.
Powell was one of those gifted demagogues American politics routinely generates: He was a genuinely smart and, in many respects, impressive man; he was also a compulsive libertine with extraordinarily bad judgment. But his Harlem constituents were devoted to him, and re-elected him in defiance of his colleagues in Washington. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the House’s vote to exclude Powell had been unconstitutional, but vindication came too late: Devoid of power and a national audience, he was narrowly defeated by Charles Rangel (who held the seat until this year) in the 1970 primary, and died two years later.
My own interest in Powell, at the time, was largely theatrical: He was an entertaining public performer, and in the midst of his troubles with Congress, produced an LP titled Keep the Faith, Baby!—his favorite catchphrase—which I eagerly acquired, and still treasure.
It was, in some respects, a pathetic performance: Masterminded by Chuck Stone, later a bumptious columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, it features Stone’s stentorian liner notes (“Powell is more than a summation of many noble acts. He has been our proud giant Sequoia in the freedom struggle”) and a half-dozen Powell orations, delivered in a tiny Bimini studio in call-and-response form to a dozen listeners, augmented by calypso music. Among the six talks, I should add, my favorite is entitled “Burn, Baby, Burn,” which dates it precisely but is also a characteristic mixture of Powell’s familiar preaching style and old-school principles: “When you learn, baby, learn, then you can earn, baby, earn. … Black power doesn’t mean anything unless you have green power.”
I can’t imagine that, if Roy Moore should be barred from the Senate, he would produce anything so memorable.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
