Can You Expel a Sitting Senator?

Once a U.S. senator is elected, they typically serve a six-year term. With repeated re-elections, some senators spend decades in Congress—the record holder is the late Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, whose streak of 51 years and 176 days may never be broken. The evidence is clear: once you’ve been voted into the Senate, it’s difficult to get you out.

But not impossible. Here are rare examples in which senators have been refused or expelled.

1. The Senate can Refuse to Seat an Appointed Senator
2. The Constitution Allows Senators to be Expelled

The Senate can Refuse to Seat an Appointed Senator

Refusing to even seat a senator is very uncommon, but it happened over 100 years ago.

In 1913, Alabama Senator Joseph Forney Johnston died in office just a few months after the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment allowed for direct election of senators, as well as clarifying the role of the state in calling special elections. To fill the vacant seat, Alabama’s governor put up Representative Henry Clayton, but he soon resigned the appointment. This was followed by Frank Glass, a local newspaper editor. As Glass was about to be seated, senators worried that his appointment was illegitimate (similar fears had surrounded Clayton). As one senator said at the time, “I believe that the [17th] Amendment means exactly what it says. It is perfectly plain and unambiguous. It simply means from this time forward every senator of the United States must be elected by the people, unless the legislature of a state by express terms empowers the executive to make temporary appointments to fill vacancies. The legislature of the state of Alabama has not given such power to the executive.”

By a vote of 32-31, the rest of the Senate agreed and refused to seat Glass, leading to a special election in 1914 that brought in a new senator.

Since then there have been multiple attempts to not seat a senator. The most notorious recent case involved Roland Burris in 2009, appointed by Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich under the latter’s cloud of corruption charges (though Burris was ultimately let in). But in reality, a refusal to seat a senator is unlikely to succeed.

In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. McCormack that as long as a duly elected representative met the age, citizenship, and residence requirements of the Constitution, they could not be excluded from the House. They could be expelled after taking their seat, but not excluded. Since it’s generally felt that this ruling extends to the Senate, it would likely be impossible to exclude an elected senator from their seat. But once that seat is taken, expulsion becomes a possibility.

The Constitution Allows Senators to be Expelled

The United States Constitution states that the House and Senate “may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”

The first time it happened was in the 1797 case of William Blount, one of the first two senators from Tennessee. Blount had worked on a plan to take control of Spanish Florida and Louisiana and transfer them to Britain with the help of Native Americans and frontiersmen. This plot was discovered and Blount was expelled, but not until he was impeached by the House of Representatives (the House has the sole power of impeachment, and it falls to the Senate to try the impeachment). The Senate ultimately decided not to try Blount, though whether that’s because senators believed that they themselves were unimpeachable or because Blount was unimpeachable because he had already been expelled and thus ceased being a senator is up for debate.

The next attempt at expulsion was in 1808, when Ohio’s John Smith was caught up in the Aaron Burr controversies. When it came to vote, the tally was 19 yeas for expulsion and 10 nays. Since the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority, Smith was saved from expulsion by one vote, though he resigned soon after.

The largest crop of expulsions was in 1861 and 1862, in regards to senators from southern states. As some senators were still officially members of the Senate, despite representing seceding states, Congress felt their status should be clarified by expulsion. As a result, 10 senators were expelled on July 11, 1861 (the expulsion order of one of the senators, William K. Sebastian of Arkansas, was later posthumously revoked after it was determined the charges “were as regards Sebastian merely a matter of suspicion and inference and wholly unfounded as to fact” and he didn’t commit conspiracy against the government). Later, a few more senators were expelled on the charge of supporting the rebellion. Including Sebastian, a grand total of 14 senators were expelled during the Civil War. Since then, no senator has been expelled.

That’s not to say there haven’t been attempts. Cases have ended in either an exoneration or the senator leaving office before the vote. The most recent near-expulsion was Nevada Senator John Ensign in 2011, accused of breaking federal laws while attempting to cover up an affair. At the time, Senator Barbara Boxer of California said the case was “substantial enough to warrant the consideration of expulsion.” Ultimately, Ensign resigned.

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A version of this story was published in 2017; it has been updated for 2025.