Impeachment vote is a low crime
After one failed attempt, Republicans in the House have managed to push through the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a margin of exactly one vote, ending up 214-213 with only three upstanding Republican dissenters supporting the Constitution. So the whole sordid affair finishes in the House, and moves on to the Senate, where it should die immediately on the vine.
The House GOP, of course, knows that the Democratic Senate is not going to vote to convict with a two-thirds majority. Whatever flaws of the upper chamber, at least it hasn’t been captured by MAGA’s weaponization of government.
Yet the impeachment vote itself is a MAGA victory for a number of reasons. Among them, it sends a clear signal to Biden cabinet officials and other executive officers that they can and will be dragged before Congress’ kangaroo court and have their reputations tarnished for, in effect, refusing to violate the law in favor of the extreme right’s political ends.
It also cheapens what should be a solemn use of legislative authority, giving the GOP the ability to point to the Donald Trump impeachments as no big deal. If impeachment becomes just another routine circus, that saps from the seriousness of the acts that prompted Trump’s two impeachment votes, and forever makes the process another in the litany of government functions that become purely vehicles for political bickering, and which the public can roll its eyes at and ultimately ignore.
As spurious as the charges were, the vote helps House Republicans advance the false narrative that the Biden administration has taken a different approach to the border than Trump and that there is some sort of invasion that Trump alone can tamp down — a key electoral strategy that showed its weakness this week in Tom Suozzi’s defeat of Republican Mazi Pilip.
For the average voter, it seems as if Mayorkas and Biden must be doing something wrong at the border, as otherwise how could the latter have been impeached? That seems easier to accept than the truth, which is that the House GOP has put politics over government for raw political theater.
The vote came at 7:16 Tuesday night as Suozzi was winning the election. They rushed it because once Suozzi is seated, impeachment would have failed. Long Island Reps. Nick LaLota, Anthony D’Esposito and Andrew Garbarino rushed from D.C. to rally for Pilip. They should all be ashamed, particularly Garbarino, who is now himself one of 11 impeachment managers for Mayorkas’ trial in the Senate.
Garbarino will be tasked with proving that the DHS leader has committed no less than high crimes and misdemeanors, a rather tall order given the total lack of evidence or even cognizable accusation that Mayorkas did anything improper, let alone remotely rising to this standard.
The Senate should consider simply not letting the show go on by dismissing the charges immediately after the trial convenes, a move that is on strong legal footing and which would stop dead the GOP’s efforts to continue this as an electoral sideshow going into this year’s presidential election. No doubt that Speaker Mike Johnson and his cavalcade of loonies would scream bloody murder, but they’d have to go do so on Fox News instead of taking up Senate floor time.