Mayorkas impeachment a distraction
House Republicans are renewing their push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas amid an ongoing set of issues at the southern border. This editorial board certainly can’t say Mayorkas has done a good job in his post, but it’s a stretch to say he’s guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” as impeachment is intended to remedy.
Last year, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, brought up the idea of impeaching Mayorkas on the grounds that he “has willfully abandoned his duty to secure the border and protect States against invasion.”
There are many words to describe the ongoing influx of migrants at the southern border, but “invasion” is not a term that should be so casually thrown around.
An example of an invasion is Russia invading Ukraine, for example.
It is not when desperate migrants from impoverished countries and failed states like Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela attempt to seek refuge in the United States.
At the time, Rep. Tom McClintock of California, no liberal, rightly condemned the impeachment attempt, saying of Mayorkas, “He is certainly guilty of that and more: maladministration, malfeasance, and neglect of duties on a truly historic scale. But these are not impeachable offenses.”
He continued, offering a history lesson for supposed conservative patriots who think themselves defenders of America, “We know this because the American Founders specifically rejected these terms at the Constitutional Convention. As Madison explained, they feared that such imprecise grounds could be twisted into a weapon for political grievances and turned against the executive branch whenever Congress saw fit.
This would make the President a mere minister of Congress, utterly destroying the separation of powers at the heart of the Constitution.”
Hence, we have the specific terms for which impeachment is reserved for: “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Yet, it appears, many in the House GOP want to stretch impeachment to make a political point. And to be sure, there’s plenty to criticize Mayorkas for.
But impeaching Mayorkas won’t solve anything. It might give Republicans running for office something to point to their constituents to show how serious they take the border issue. It’s all just theatrics, though.
Migrants will continue to come and the U.S. federal government will remain ill -quipped to handle it. Both parties, especially in an election year, obviously want to sidestep what ultimately must and should happen, which is comprehensive immigration reform to modernize and streamline our immigration system.
But until we make it easier for people to come here legally, and in an orderly fashion, we will see what we see at the southern border.
We live in a country with considerable wealth and opportunity, blinding many of us to the desperate situation of people elsewhere. But reality is what it is.
And on the narrow point of impeaching Mayorkas, the whole thing is for show and reasonable Republicans should reject it.