Republicans’ political impeachment stunt against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to a head this week in the Senate, with lawmakers in the upper chamber voting to dismiss the charges.
On Tuesday, House Republicans sent two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the upper chamber, and on Wednesday, senators were sworn in as jurors for a trial. The articles accuse Mayorkas of failing to enforce immigration laws, making false statements to Congress, and obstructing oversight into DHS policies, all charges he denies.
On Wednesday, the Senate rejected both articles, voting 51-48 along party lines to deem the first “unconstitutional” and 51-49 to dismiss the second article and adjourn the trial before it even really began. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted present on the first article.
This is the first impeachment trial of a Cabinet secretary in more than a century. It’s likely to be remembered not as a historic moment of political accountability but as a marker of how polarized Congress has become over the last decade.
The swift conclusion of the proceedings marks a win for Democrats and the Biden administration, who denounced the impeachment effort as a sham and a waste of resources. Democrats have long said that the behavior Mayorkas is accused of does not qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which is the legal threshold for impeachment.
Republicans, meanwhile, wanted to drag the process out in order to draw more attention to the issue of immigration, and to use the proceedings as a platform to criticize the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Mayorkas oversees border security and asylum as DHS secretary, so going after him created an opportunity to focus on these subjects and to make election-year promises to voters that the GOP will fix issues at the border if it come back into power. These efforts come as immigration has become a more potent campaign flash point this year because of the surge in…
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