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A plague on both these houses:
The Senate seems to lack the political will for a bipartisan border deal.
The House lacks an effective majority for a partisan impeachment effort as GOP leaders scramble for votes.
And so the knot of US immigration policy seems likely to stay hopelessly tied even though both sides of the aisle now agree there’s a disaster at the border. Additional aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is also locked up.
House Republicans should be taking a victory lap. Their pressure helped create an environment in which a Democratic president was promising to shut the US border with Mexico to new arrivals, confirming their years of warning about the flow of asylum-seekers from Central and South America and other continents.
In return, President Joe Biden wanted additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, something many Republicans also support.
Rather than respond to acknowledgment of the border crisis by working with Democrats and the White House on a deal, House Republicans planned instead to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a protest of Biden’s immigration approach.
Except, as the vote approached, they seemed to realize they might not have the votes to impeach Mayorkas after all. Their majority is so small they can only afford to lose two or three votes, depending on how many lawmakers show up to vote. Two Republicans, Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado and Tom McClintock of California, oppose the impeachment.
“Maladministration or incompetence does not rise to what our founders considered an impeachable offense,” Buck wrote in an op-ed for The Hill in which he…
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