The House is set to vote Tuesday on two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that charge him with not being good at his role handling U.S. immigration policy. Those charges aren’t based on any evidence that Mayorkas has committed high crimes or misdemeanors. Given their extremely slim majority, it’s no guarantee that Republicans have the votes to impeach Mayorkas. If they do, though, then their passing one or both articles would jump-start the next stage: a Senate impeachment trial.
It would be the first and only impeachment trial of a Cabinet member since 1876, when Secretary of War William Belknap, who had already resigned, was acquitted. In this case, the Senate needs to quickly dispose of the rambling, deceptive, explicitly partisan charges against Mayorkas and acquit him. The less time it spends dealing with this sham of an impeachment, the better. There’s work the Senate needs to get done that treating these articles with even an ounce more seriousness than they deserve will only hinder.
The less time it spends dealing with this sham of an impeachment, the better.
I once worried that unceremoniously tossing out the charges against Mayorkas would be a blow to impeachment as a credible method of keeping officials in check. But that ship sailed with the GOP’s efforts to remove President Bill Clinton. It kept on sailing with the party’s decision not only to defend former President Donald Trump at all costs but also to seek retribution on his behalf. The GOP has already made impeachment, as Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, recently told The New York Times, “more of a political and public relations tool than a serious mechanism of executive branch accountability.”
If the House does vote to impeach on Tuesday, then the Senate will have some decisions to make. The overarching impeachment rules the Senate adopted in 1986 say a trial must begin once the House transmits the articles of impeachment…
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