Congress can't fix border and fund allies or impeach
Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas was not, in fact, impeached by the House.
A border security package instantly collapsed in the Senate. And foreign aid for Ukraine as its fights Russia is stubbornly stalled.
The broken U.S. Congress failed in stunning fashion this week as Republicans in both the House and the Senate revolted in new and unimaginable ways against their own agenda. Lawmakers will try to do it all over again — as soon as next week.
“This is the mob rule right now in Congress — and I'm ready for mob rule. ... But it's not a way to govern,” said Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana.
Just 48 hours put on display a spectacular level of dysfunction even for a Congress that has already set new standards for infighting, disruption and chaos after last year's historic election, then ouster, of the Republican House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.
It shows how deeply the Republican Party, under Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is by choice or by force, turning away from its traditional role as a working partner in the U.S.'s two-party system to a new one that is rooted in Donald Trump's vision of the GOP.
In dramatic back-toback scenes this week — a closed-door shouting match of Senate Republicans testing McConnell's slipping hold on power late Monday and Speaker Johnson presiding glumly over failures in the chamber he could not control Tuesday — provided new entries for the history books.
“Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it's the art of the impossible,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, RUtah, the party's 2012 presidential nominee.
“Let's put forward proposals that can't possibly pass — so we can say to our respective bases, Look how I'm fighting for you,” said Romney, explaining the current mindset.
The next steps are highly uncertain as an emboldened generation of hard-right lawmakers allied with Trump are energized by the disruption, eager to carry on with their emerging agenda despite the GOP's slim majority in the House.
The House is expected to try again to impeach Mayorkas, possibly next week, if Republicans can boost their numbers over what was essentially a tie vote Tuesday.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who led the Mayorkas impeachment drive, is determined to see it to the finish as Republicans rebuke the Biden administration's handling of a historic surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Crazy time,” said Rep. Hal Rogers who, at 86, is dean of the House as its senior most member, as he returned to Washington to vote for impeaching Mayorkas after suffering injuries in a car crash.
“I was hoping for something better,” he acknowledged.
Mayorkas, facing two articles of impeachment over allegations of refusing to abide by immigration laws and breaching the public trust, called the charges baseless.
“I'm focused on the work,” Mayorkas said at a press conference in Las Vegasl.
Republicans lost the impeachment by one vote not only because three Republican lawmakers dissented, but also because one Democrat, Rep. Al Green of Texas, surprised colleagues by leaving his hospital bed where he had undergone surgery to come vote, tipping the outcome.
It's the kind of miscount many longtime Congress watchers said would have rarely, if ever, happened under the laser-focused leadership of Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker.
To up their tally, House Republicans are counting on either winning a special election to replace the ousted GOP Rep. George Santos in New York or waiting for Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who has been receiving cancer treatment, to return to Washington.
“They're unable to rally behind anything but extremism,” said Democratic Whip Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.
In the Senate, McConnell faced a separate revolt over the border security package he had reluctantly agreed to pursue as a way to appease hard-right demands to link national security aid for Ukraine to an almost politically impossible compromise on immigration.
As soon as the bipartisan package was unveiled it encountered fierce blowback from fellow Republicans led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and others, forcing McConnell into an abrupt about-face to abandon the effort.