The Republican-led House of Representatives impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday. It is only the second time in US history that a Cabinet member has been indicted.
The House of Representatives narrowly approved two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, 214 to 213, accusing him of willfully violating federal immigration laws and blocking congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security.
Mayorkas faces a trial in the Senate, where he will almost certainly be acquitted by the chamber’s Democratic majority. The Senate, which is in recess until February 26, will either reject the articles of impeachment outright or send the trial to a special committee to hear evidence.
“History will not be kind to House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship in targeting an honorable public servant to play petty political games,” President Joe Biden said in a statement after the vote.
The White House has repeatedly condemned the impeachment effort over the past year, calling it a political distraction for Republicans who rejected $20 billion in border security funding in a bipartisan Senate deal last week.
“While Secretary Mayorkas helped a group of Republican and Democratic senators develop bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security and obtain the resources needed for enforcement, House Republicans wasted months on this baseless, unconstitutional impeachment,” one said subsequent statement from the Department of Homeland Security The election.
Two Democrats, Reps. Judy Chu of California and Lois Frankel of Florida, were absent from Tuesday’s vote, allowing Republicans to win the majority.
Chu was in isolation after testing positive for Covid-19. She would have voted against impeachment if she had been in the House, she said in a post Tuesday night on X.
The Republican-led impeachment motion was a small comeuppance for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Republican hardliners after the same attempt failed last week.
Johnson told NBC News that Republicans were “happy to have their job done” after Tuesday night’s vote.
This time, Republicans were confident they would have the majority to impeach after House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., returned to Washington following cancer treatment that prevented him from breaking the House’s 215-215 tie to break last week.
“There’s always concern, but no, it’s going to happen,” Majority Leader Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said Tuesday before the vote. “All Republicans will come back and it will pass.”
That optimism still depended on a razor-thin Republican majority in the House, threatened by a Northeast snowstorm that lawmakers feared would hamper travel to Capitol Hill. Even with all Republican members present, Republicans could only afford to lose three members of their caucus who voted against impeachment.
In last Tuesday’s vote, Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California crossed party lines to help Democrats thwart impeachment efforts. All three stuck to their no votes on Tuesday evening.
Days after helping to fend off impeachment last week, Gallagher announced he would not seek re-election to a fifth term in the House, leaving his seat in a key swing state still up for grabs.
Tuesday’s new impeachment vote came just hours before polls closed in a New York special election to replace the former representative. George Santos’ seat would further squeeze the Republican majority in the House if Democratic candidate Tom Suozzi wins.
Johnson and ultra-conservative Republicans view Mayorkas’ impeachment as an important part of their broader criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border, which has seen record numbers of migrant crossings in recent months.
Mayorkas argued that the chaos at the border was not his fault but rather a symptom of the country’s decades-long broken immigration system.
“We are not responsible for a broken system,” Mayorkas said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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2024-02-14 01:49:37
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