When former Rep. Ken Buck announced last month that he was resigning from Congress, the Colorado Republican made little effort to hide his disgust with the state of the institution. In fact, he pointed to one specific abuse — executed by his own party — that he found especially indefensible.
“We’ve taken impeachment, and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck declared. “This place keeps going downhill.”
He was referring, of course, to House Republicans’ decision two months ago to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — the first-ever impeachment of a sitting cabinet secretary — despite the inconvenient fact that the GOP couldn’t find any evidence of high crimes committed by the DHS chief.
Critics of the move accused Republican lawmakers of treating Congress’ impeachment power like a partisan toy, which the party was a little too eager to throw around as an election-season plaything.
GOP officials keep proving their critics right. NBC News reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson will delay sending articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate until next week, his spokesman said, as Senate Republicans consider ways to inflict political pain on Democrats, including a threat to bring the upper chamber to a halt.
House GOP leaders could’ve sent the matter to the Senate in February, and if Republicans genuinely believed this was an urgent concern, they likely would’ve done just that. Instead, they waited two months and planned to advance the process today.
But those plans were delayed — not for substantive reasons, but because the party is still trying to figure out how to have the most fun with their toy. As a Washington Post report summarized:
Republican senators are widely skeptical that impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas meets the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. But it’s an election year, after all, and…
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