The U.S. House of Representatives voted 376 to 30 to expel one of its own for the first time in over a century. The member was Michael Myers, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. His crime was not treason or insurrection, but greed captured on grainy video. He was a convicted felon, having been found guilty of bribery and conspiracy two months prior in the Abscam sting.
Myers was one of several officials caught in the FBI operation, which involved agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik offering money for political favors. Myers accepted $50,000, promising to use his influence to keep the sheik's fictional associate in the United States. The expulsion was procedural; the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to remove a member, and a felony conviction provided the grounds. The last expulsion before Myers was in 1861 for supporting the Confederacy.
This event is often remembered as a colorful political scandal, a precursor to reality television. Its deeper significance was the formal reassertion of congressional authority over its membership. The House chose not to wait for the appeals process, defining conviction itself as the breach of trust. It set a modern precedent that criminal guilt, not just disloyalty, could merit expulsion.
Myers's case established a template. It demonstrated that the chamber could act decisively against corruption, even when the method of entrapment was controversial. The vote was a rare moment of bipartisan consensus on ethics, creating a benchmark that would be referenced, but not often matched, in future scandals. The sheik was fake, but the expulsion was real.