Posted on 01/28/24
| News Source: The Hill
House Republicans unveiled their articles of impeachment to remove Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, formally kicking off a controversial process as Democrats and experts argue he has not committed any high crimes or misdemeanors to justify booting him from his post.
The resolution includes two articles, one that accuses Mayorkas of violating immigration laws through a host of different Biden administration policies, while a second article combines a host of the GOP’s most-contested arguments, accusing the secretary of falling short of his duties, misleading Congress, and obstructing their investigation.
The House Homeland Security Committee will mark up the resolution during a Tuesday meeting, while Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has pledged to bring them to the House floor “as soon as possible.”
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment. He has willfully and systemically refused to comply with immigration laws enacted by Congress. He has breached the public trust by knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people, and obstructing congressional oversight of his department,” Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said in a statement.
“Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed. Yet Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly refused to do so. His lawless behavior was exactly what the Framers gave us the impeachment power to remedy.”
Mayorkas’s impeachment is both remarkable, and in some ways anticlimactic. The floor vote will be the second time in history that the House has considered removal of a Cabinet official, something not seen since the 1870s. But it’s likely to get little traction in the Democrat-led Senate, where a two-thirds vote would be needed to remove Mayorkas.
Democrats, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and even some conservatives see its significance as a GOP abuse of congressional power that caves to demands from its most far-right members, with Republicans seeking to impeach Mayorkas over policy differences that fall well short of the constitutional standard of high crimes and misdemeanors.
“This markup is just more of the same political games from House Homeland Security Committee (CHS) Republicans. They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” DHS wrote in a memo in anticipation of the expected allegations of the impeachment articles.
“This farce of an impeachment is a distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws.”