by The U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Tuesday to impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, in a precedent-breaking vote that accused him of willfully refusing to enforce border and security laws. violate public trust.
In a 214-213 vote, Republicans overcame strong opposition from Democrats and reservations in their own ranks to make Mayorkas the first sitting Cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached.
It amounted to partisan criticism of President Biden’s immigration policies by the Republican Party, which seeks to use an increase in migration across the US-Mexico border during his term as a political weapon against him and Democrats in the elections this year.
Biden condemned the House vote in a statement Tuesday night.
“History will not look favorably on House Republicans for their brazen act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant to play petty political games,” he said.
The vote came a week after the House rejected the charges against Mayorkas when Republicans, who control the House by a razor-thin margin, tried and failed to muster a majority to pass them.
It put Mayorkas in the company of former presidents and administration officials who have been accused of personal corruption and other wrongdoing.
But the charges against him broke with history by failing to identify any such crime and instead effectively declared the political decisions Mayorkas has made a constitutional crime. The approach threatened to lower the bar for impeachments, which has already fallen in recent years, reducing what was once Congress’ most potent tool for removing despots from power to a weapon that can be deployed in political fights. .
Democrats, former Homeland Security secretaries, the nation’s largest police union and a chorus of constitutional law experts (including conservatives) have denounced the impeachment as a blatant attempt to resolve a political dispute with constitutional punishment. They said Republicans had presented no evidence that Mayorkas’ conduct rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, the standard for impeachment set out in the Constitution.
The charges against Mayorkas are expected to be rejected in the Democratic-led Senate, where conviction would require a two-thirds majority and where even some Republicans have given up on the effort. The House is expected to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate in the last week of February, according to the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, and senators would be sworn in as jurors the following day.
“The only reason for this impeachment is for President Johnson to further appease Donald Trump,” Schumer said in a statement, adding that House Republicans “did not present any evidence of anything resembling a crime.” contestable.”
But House Republicans insisted that Mayorkas had failed to fulfill his duties under the Constitution and argued for impeachment as necessary.
“Congress has taken decisive action to defend our constitutional order and hold accountable a public official who has violated his oath of office,” said Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who prepared the charges against Mayorkas, he said in a statement. The proceeding, he added, “demonstrated beyond a doubt that Secretary Mayorkas has willfully and systematically refused to comply with the laws of the United States and violated the public trust.”
Three Republicans — Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California — sided with Democrats against the charges. They warned that impeaching a Cabinet secretary for the way he did his job would weaken a heavy constitutional penalty and do nothing to address serious immigration problems.
“We have to stop using these impeachments; if there are political differences, we have other tools,” Buck said in an interview after the vote, adding that impeachment had “become a partisan game that, when it comes to constitutional interpretation, it really should be above this.”
But unlike last week, when Republican defections were enough to sink the bill, leaders had enough members present Tuesday to get the charges passed, albeit by the narrowest of margins. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, returned to Washington after a round of treatment for blood cancer, although another pair of Republicans, Reps. Brian Mast and Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, did not vote. The absences of two Democrats, Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Judy Chu of California, allowed Republicans to still prevail. If any of the Democrats had voted, the GOP would have failed for the second time to impeach Mayorkas.
In a declaration Posted on social media, Ms Chu said she had tested positive for Covid-19 and would have voted against impeachment. In a video published On social media, Mast said he and Frankel were stuck at Palm Beach International Airport, waiting for a plane with mechanical problems to be repaired.
In approving the charges, the House also named 11 Republicans to serve as impeachment managers, including Green and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the right-wing lawmaker who led the charge against Mayorkas.
Mr. Green’s panel produced a report in which they said of the secretary of Cuban origin that they were “deporting Secretary Mayorkas from his position.”
The first of the two charges approved Tuesday accuses Mayorkas of replacing Trump-era policies, such as the program commonly called Remain in Mexico, which required many migrants to wait at the southwest border for their court dates, with “catch and release.” ”. “Policies that allowed immigrants to roam freely in the United States. Republicans accuse Mayorkas of ignoring multiple mandates of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that immigrants “shall be detained” pending decisions on asylum and removal orders, and acting beyond his authority to allow the entry of immigrants to the country on parole.
Democrats have responded forcefully, pointing out that Mayorkas, like any homeland security secretary, has the right to set policies to manage the waves of migrants arriving at the border. That includes allowing certain migrants to temporarily enter the country for humanitarian reasons and prioritizing which migrants to detain, particularly when working with limited resources.
The second article accuses Mayorkas of violating the public trust by misrepresenting the status of the border and hindering congressional efforts to investigate it. Republicans base those accusations on a claim by Mayorkas in 2022 that his department had “operational control” over the border, which is defined under a 2006 statute as the absence of illegal migrant or drug crossings. Mayorkas has said he was referring instead to a less absolute definition used by the Border Patrol.
They also accuse Mayorkas of failing to produce documents, including materials he was ordered to give them by subpoena, during an investigation into his border policies and of evading their efforts to get him to testify as part of his impeachment proceedings. Administration officials have responded that Mayorkas has produced tens of thousands of pages of documents in accordance with the panel’s requests. He offered to testify in person, but Republicans on the panel rescinded their invitation to appear after both sides encountered scheduling issues.
A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, Mia Ehrenberg, criticized House Republicans Tuesday night, accusing them of “trampling on the Constitution for political gain instead of working to resolve serious challenges at the border.”
“House Republicans have falsely smeared a dedicated public servant who has spent more than 20 years enforcing our laws and serving our country,” he added. “Secretary Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security will continue to work every day to keep Americans safe.”
On Tuesday, just hours before the vote, the U.S. Border Patrol released new data showing that the number of immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico plummeted 50 percent in January compared to December. But December was an all-time high and numbers reached record levels during the Biden administration.
The only other Cabinet secretary to suffer the same fate was William Belknap, Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant. Belknap resigned in 1876, just before the House impeached him for corruption after finding evidence that he was involved in widespread irregularities, including accepting bribes. The Senate later acquitted him.
Hamed Al Aziz and Kayla Guo contributed reports.
