House Republicans have spent months searching unsuccessfully for a smoking gun in the Joe Biden impeachment investigation. Instead of admitting failure, they are now pivoting to another target in their frenzy to impeach anyone, no matter how baselessly: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
What really concerns us, though, is the way these impeachments will both weaponize a key constitutional remedy and undermine its sober original intent.
Both the Biden and Mayorkas impeachments are clearly not backed up by evidence. And both borrow from a House Freedom Caucus playbook of unmerited impeachment proceedings that dates to the failed 2016 impeachment of then-IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. What really concerns us, though, is the way these impeachments will both weaponize a key constitutional remedy and undermine its sober original intent. America needs impeachment to deal with the threat of future rogue presidents or other wayward government officials. Ahead of a potential Trump-Biden rematch, this is the worst possible time to turn the threat of impeachment into a partisan joke.
It is bad enough that House Republicans appear to be torpedoing a proposed compromise on border security legislation. But they are now going further to placate the leader of their party. Donald Trump was impeached, and so they are bound and determined to impeach someone, anyone, in retaliation — no matter the lack of any constitutional basis.
Biden was their initial target. On his first full day in office in 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., introduced articles of impeachment based on nothing. And Republicans have been unsuccessfully trying to find any shred of “evidence” ever since. The GOP has contemplated impeaching the president over the White House’s border policy (foreshadowing its focus on Mayorkas) and Biden’s family business dealings.
Last September, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced that he was directing the House to formally look into…
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