Senate rejects impeachment articles against Mayorkas, ending trial against Cabinet secretary

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. House has voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S-Mexico border. In a historic rebuke of a sitting Cabinet secretary, the Republican majority was determined to try again to impeach Mayorkas after having failed last week. Tuesday evening’s (Feb. 13, 2024) vote was tight, even with the arrival of Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who has been away from Washington for cancer care. Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare majority could not spare defections or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition. President Joe Biden called the impeachment of Mayorkas a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. House voted Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, with the Republican majority determined to punish the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S-Mexico border after failing last week in a politically embarrassing setback.

The evening (Feb. 13, 2024) roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary charged in nearly 150 years.

In a historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. With the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to bolster the GOP’s numbers after being away from Washington for cancer care and a Northeastern storm impacting some others, Republicans recouped — despite dissent from their own ranks.

President Joe Biden called it a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.”

The charges against Mayorkas next go to the Senate for a trial, but neither Democratic nor even some Republican senators have shown interest in the matter and it may be indefinitely shelved to a committee. The Senate is expected to receive the articles of impeachment from the House after returning to session Feb. 26, 2024.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the case against Mayorkas a “sham impeachment” and a “new low for House Republicans.”

In a frantic scene of vote-tallying on the House floor, the GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border took on an air of political desperation as Republicans struggle to make good on their priorities.

Mayorkas faced two articles of impeachment filed by the Homeland Security Committee arguing that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce existing immigration laws and that he breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure.

But critics of the impeachment effort said the charges against Mayorkas amount to a policy dispute over Biden’s border strategy, hardly rising to the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The House had initially launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden over his son’s business dealings, but instead turned its attention to Mayorkas after Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, pushed the debate forward following the panel’s months-long investigation.

Greene, who will serve as an impeachment manager in a potential Senate trial, hugged Scalise afterward and posed for photos with other lawmakers. She said senators “better pay attention to the American people and how they feel, and then they need to read our articles of impeachment.”

Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House.

Various House Republicans have prepared legislation to begin deporting migrants who were temporarily allowed into the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies, many as they await adjudication of asylum claims.

“We have no choice,” Trump said in stark language at a weekend rally in South Carolina.

At the same time, Johnson rejected a bipartisan Senate border security package Mayorkas had spent weeks negotiating. But the speaker has been unable to advance his Republicans’ own proposal, which is a nonstarter in the Senate.

“Congress needs to act,” Biden said in a statement after the vote, “to give me, Secretary Mayorkas, and my administration the tools and resources needed to address the situation at the border.”

Three Republican representatives who broke ranks last week over the Mayorkas impeachment — Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California — all did so again Tuesday. With a 219-212 majority, Johnson had few votes to spare. His margin got even smaller later Tuesday night when New York Democrat Thomas Suozzi won a special election to the seat once held by Republican George Santos before his expulsion from Congress.

Several leading conservative scholars along with former Homeland Security secretaries from both Republican and Democratic administrations have dismissed the Mayorkas impeachment as unwarranted or a waste of time.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said what the Republicans “have succeeded in doing is degrading and tarnishing the constitutional meaning of impeachment.”

But Scalise told reporters after the vote, “It sends a message that we’re not just going to sit by while the secretary of homeland security fails to do his job at keeping our homeland safe.”

Mayorkas is not the only Biden administration official the House Republicans want to impeach. They have filed legislation to impeach a long list including Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Never before has a sitting Cabinet secretary been impeached, and it was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. He resigned before the vote.

Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.

“There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border,” Mayorkas said over the weekend on NBC. “And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it.”

Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts.

“We always explore what options are available to us that are permissible under the law,” Mayorkas said.

Last week’s failed vote to impeach Mayorkas — a surprise outcome rarely seen on such a high-profile issue — was a stunning display in the chamber that has been churning through months of GOP chaos since the ouster of the previous House speaker.

At the time, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who had been hospitalized for emergency abdominal surgery, made a surprise arrival, wheeled into the chamber in scrubs and socks to vote against it — leaving the vote tied and leading to its failure.

“Obviously, you feel good when you can make a difference,” said Green, describing his painstaking route from hospital bed to the House floor. “All I did was what I was elected to do, and that was to cast my vote on the issues of our time, using the best judgment available to me.”

Republican holdout Gallagher, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits.

JANUARY 30, 2024:

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are moving swiftly toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday (Jan. 30, 2024) on two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, including over what they call his “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws. But Democrats call the proceedings a sham ordered up by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner. Democrats argue that Republicans should instead be working with the Biden administration to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. Mayorkas is defending his work at the department and urging the House to focus on updating the nation’s “broken and outdated” immigration laws.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans are moving swiftly toward impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over what they call his “willful and systematic” refusal to enforce immigration laws, but in a personal appeal he argued they should instead be working with the Biden administration on U.S.-Mexico border security.

The Homeland Security Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday (Jan. 30, 2024) on two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, as border security becomes a top issue in the 2024 elections. Republicans are making GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s hardline deportation approach to immigration their own.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the House is moving ahead with Mayorkas’ impeachment “by necessity” with a full House vote “as soon as possible.”

Rarely has a Cabinet member faced impeachment’s bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and Democrats called the proceedings a “sham” that could set a chilling precedent for other civil servants. It would be the first impeachment of a Cabinet official in nearly 150 years.

The House’s impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas have created an oddly split-screen Capitol Hill, as the Senate has been working intently with the secretary on a bipartisan border security package that is now on life support.

The package being negotiated by the senators with Mayorkas could emerge as the most consequential bipartisan immigration proposal in a decade. Or it could collapse in political failure as Republicans, and some Democrats, run from the effort.

Trump, on the campaign trail and in private talks, has tried to squelch the Senate’s border security deal. “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill,” Trump said over the weekend in Las Vegas.

President Joe Biden, in his own campaign remarks in South Carolina, said if Congress sends him a bill with emergency authority he’ll “shut down the border right now” to get it under control.

In a pointed letter ahead of the hearing, Mayorkas provided a rebuttal to the charges against him.

Mayorkas defended his work at the department and his negotiations with the Senate, and he urged the House to focus on updating the nation’s “broken and outdated” immigration laws for the 21st century and an era of record global migration.

“We need a legislative solution and only Congress can provide it,” Mayorkas wrote to the panel’s Republican chairman, Mark Green of Tennessee.

Mayorkas, who never testified on his own behalf during the impeachment proceedings — he and the committee couldn’t agree on a date for his appearance — drew on his own background as a child brought to the U.S. by his parents fleeing Cuba, and his career spent prosecuting criminals.

“Your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me” from public service, he wrote.

The articles charge that Mayorkas “willfully and systematically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” and that he has “breached the public trust” in his claims to Congress that the border is secure.

The Republicans are focused on the secretary’s handling of the southern border, which has experienced a record number of migrants over the past year, and what they describe as a crisis of the administration’s own making.

Republicans contend that the administration and Mayorkas specifically either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.

They also accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress, pointing to comments about the border being secure or about vetting of Afghans airlifted to the U.S. after military withdrawal from the country.

“It’s high time,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called Mayorkas the “architect” of the border problems. “He has what’s coming to him.”

The House impeachment hearings against Mayorkas sprinted ahead in January while the Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Biden over the business dealings over his son, Hunter Biden, dragged.

Democrats argued that Mayorkas is acting under his legal authorities at the department, and that the criticisms against him do not rise to the level of impeachment.

“House Republicans have produced no evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has committed an impeachable offense,” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

Jeffries called the impeachment proceedings a “political stunt” ordered up by Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a Trump ally, who pushed the resolution forward toward the votes.

It’s unclear if House Republicans will have the support from their ranks to go through with the impeachment, especially with their slim majority and with Democrats expected to vote against it.

Last year, eight House Republicans voted to shelve the impeachment resolution proposed by Greene rather than send it along to the committee, though many of them have since signaled they would be open to it.

If the House does agree to impeach Mayorkas, the charges would next to go the Senate for a trial. In 1876, the House impeached Defense Secretary William Belknap in 1876 over kickbacks in government contracts, but the Senate acquitted him in a trial.