Republican impeachment of Mayorkas fails
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Tuesday defeated impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after a small group of Republicans broke with their party and refused to support what amounted to a partisan indictment of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
The failure of the effort was a stunning setback for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA., who had vowed to move forward with the vote and expressed confidence that he had the backing to charge Mayorkas with high crimes and misdemeanors for failing to lock down the United States border with Mexico amid a migrant surge. House Republicans have been promising to do so for more than a year.
In an extraordinary scene on the House floor, Republican leaders held the vote open for several minutes, scrambling to corral the necessary votes to approve the charges as Democrats jeered and yelled “Order!” and the tally hovered at a tie. In the end, three Republican defections — by Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom Mcclintock of California — were enough to sink the measure, which failed 216-214.
Last week, the House Homeland Security Committee approved two articles that charged him with refusing to comply with the law and breaching the public trust. But it was only over the past few weeks that Republican leaders, under pressure from the hard right, rushed the impeachment through the committee and to the floor — without ever ensuring they had the requisite support to pass it given their minuscule House majority.
As the vote drew near, some Republicans began airing their reservations about impeaching a Cabinet secretary for the policies of the “Secretary administration Mayorkas he serves.is guilty of maladministration of our immigration laws on a cosmic scale, but we know that’s not grounds for impeachment, because the American founders specifically rejected it,” Mcclintock said on the House floor, explaining his opposition to the charges. Cabinet secretaries, he added, “can be impeached for committing a crime relating to their office, but not for carrying out presidential policy. This border crisis can’t be fixed by replacing one left-wing official with another.”
Buck had signaled for weeks that he opposed the move. Other Republicans, including Gallagher, had refused to say how they would vote.
The charges earned immediate and overwhelming condemnation from Democrats, former secretaries of homeland security and constitutional law experts — including several conservatives. They argued that Republicans were trying to spin a policy dispute into a constitutional indictment, with no evidence that Mayorkas’ conduct rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
“We have serious problems at the border — no one denies that — but these are not serious people,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-calif., a lead prosecutor during House Democrats’ first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. “This impeachment is baseless, it is unconstitutional, and it should be defeated.”
Republicans’ failed effort at impeachment unfolded as they cheered on the demise of a Senate effort to pass a bipartisan national security supplemental package that would crack down on border crossings. For weeks, Johnson has been warning that the Senate bill, which Mayorkas helped to negotiate, would be dead on arrival in the House, dissuading many Senate Republicans from supporting the measure, which was expected to fail in a test vote today.
Democrats warned that Republicans would suffer political consequences for attempting to impeach Mayorkas, which they said amounted to pursuing a political vendetta.
“You really want to impeach Joe Biden, but you realized that that is politically unpopular,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said on the floor.
“You will live with this like a scarlet letter,” he told Republicans, adding that Mayorkas should treat the impeachment “like a badge of honor because it’s worthless, it means nothing, it’s fake, it’s fraudulent and it’s foolish.”
It was unclear how Republicans planned to regroup after the defeat, given how much capital leaders had placed on pursuing the impeachment charges — and how politically important the issue of the border is expected to be for the GOP in an election year.
At the tail end of the vote, Rep. Blake Moore, R-utah, switched his vote to “no” and then moved to reconsider the matter, which would allow leaders to bring it up again at another time if they can manage to persuade holdouts to change their minds.
“The truth is, the extreme MAGA Republicans running the House of Representatives don’t want solutions, they want a political issue,” Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the homeland security panel, said on the floor. Thompson decried the Mayorkas impeachment as a ploy “to distort the Constitution and the secretary’s record to cover up their inability and unwillingness to work with Democrats to strengthen border security.”
Critics of the case pointed out that attempting to remove the secretary was unlikely to bring about a change in the Biden administration’s border policies, and would not suddenly equip officials with the powers and resources they needed to do a more effective job at carrying out the nation’s border enforcement laws.
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of three former secretaries of homeland security — Michael Chertoff, who served under former President George W. Bush, and Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson — admonished Republicans for focusing on impeachment instead of working to pass laws to improve the border.
“Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas solves nothing and leaves our outdated immigration system exactly where it is now — broken,” they wrote. “We urge you to set aside this groundless impeachment effort and get back to solving America’s real problems.”