After an embarrassing flop last week, House Republicans successfully impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday.
This time around, the return of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) helped guarantee Republicans the votes they needed for the effort to advance, though the vote was still close: 214-213, with all Democrats and three GOP lawmakers — Reps. Ken Buck (CO), Mike Gallagher (WI) and Tom McClintock (CA) — voting against it.
Mayorkas, who as DHS secretary oversees border security and programs like asylum, is now the first Cabinet official to be impeached in over a century. However, he’s unlikely to be forced out of office. To be removed, the Democrat-controlled Senate would have to vote to convict Mayorkas, and it’s not expected to do so.
For Republicans, impeachment is little more than their latest political stunt, and another aimed at keeping focus on the southern border and the issue of immigration ahead of the 2024 election. The vote is also an opportunity to try to distract from the GOP’s likely presidential nominee’s many legal problems by putting the attention on the Biden administration. And lastly, it’s a carrot that House Speaker Mike Johnson is using to generate goodwill with the far-right flank of the party as he battles to keep his leadership position and make progress on spending bills unpalatable to his most conservative colleagues.
Although Republicans were eventually successful, the whole ordeal has highlighted how tenuous GOP unity continues to be, and how the party has struggled to make concrete progress on its goals this term. And it sets a concerning precedent for how impeachment can be used as a political weapon, since both Democrats and legal experts widely argued that nothing Mayorkas has done has reached the threshold of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Republicans’ politically motivated impeachment, briefly explained
House Republicans have impeached Mayorkas on two articles, or charges.
The…
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