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“A Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives panel early on Wednesday advanced impeachment charges against Democratic President Joe Biden's top border official… The House Homeland Security Committee approved two articles of impeachment targeting Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas following a lengthy hearing where lawmakers split sharply along partisan lines. The charges allege Mayorkas intentionally encouraged illegal immigration with lax policies and violated public trust by making false statements to Congress.” Reuters
Here’s our previous coverage of the border. The Flip Side
The right generally supports impeaching Mayorkas for failing to carry out his duties.
“[Mayorkas] is merely the implementer and the symbol of President Biden’s dereliction, but he is still willfully failing to do his duty and thus a fit subject for impeachment…
“The administration’s core act of lawlessness is ignoring the fact that, under federal statute, illegal immigrants must be detained until they are removed or given asylum or some other relief is granted. There are legal complications and practical difficulties involved in doing this, but the Biden administration has demonstrated no interest in trying…
“This kind of purposeful neglect of the duties of one’s office is precisely an offense for which impeachment is a constitutional remedy. Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas would draw more attention to the border crisis and perhaps create more pressure on the president to carry out the duties that the law and our constitutional system impose on him. If nothing else, it would be a strong statement of institutional disapproval by the House, which wrote and passed the laws that are being ignored.”
The Editors, National Review
“This impeachment effort puts Democrats in the House and Senate in a painful spot. The longer the Mayorkas proceedings last, the worse for Democrats. To prevent the secretary’s impeachment and removal, Democrats will be forced to defend the administration’s efforts on immigration. That’s a heavy lift.”
Charles Lipson, Spectator World
Some argue, “If Congress holds Mr. Mayorkas impeachable for policy failure, what’s the limiting principle? Are his deputies also guilty of ‘high crimes’ for implementing the Biden immigration agenda? Career officials? How many GOP cabinet secretaries will the next Democratic House line up to impeach? Policy disputes are for the voting booth, not impeachment. All the more so because the main architect of the border-security fiasco isn’t Mr. Mayorkas. It’s his boss, President Biden…
“Impeaching Mr. Mayorkas won’t have any effect on policy, or even on the politics of border security. Most voters don’t know who Mr. Mayorkas is. Even if the House passes the articles, on a largely partisan vote, there is no chance the Democratic Senate will convict him. Impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would be the political equivalent of a no-confidence vote. This would continue Congress’s recent trend of defining impeachment down…
“A better idea is to strike a deal with Mr. Biden on serious border-security reforms that would restrict his discretion on parole, rewrite the asylum standard, and give the executive other tools to control the border. If Messrs. Mayorkas and Biden refuse to use them, the GOP will have an election issue. And the tools will be there for the next President to use.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left opposes impeaching Mayorkas, arguing that it is a PR stunt.
The left opposes impeaching Mayorkas, arguing that it is a PR stunt.
“Mayorkas would be the first Cabinet secretary in 148 years to be impeached by the House. The first and only one so far to be impeached was William Belknap, who served as secretary of war during the Ulysses Grant administration… In 1876, House investigators found evidence that some traders had given thousands of dollars in kickbacks to Belknap and his wife in exchange for exclusive rights to sell goods at the forts…
“Belknap’s scheme, which he confessed to Grant before resigning, was among the most brazenly corrupt actions ever taken by a Cabinet secretary. The charges against Mayorkas, by comparison, are pitifully weak.”
Matt Ford, New Republic
“No matter that no administration, Democrat or Republican, can possibly comply with the technical requirement to detain every individual who crosses the border illegally; Congress has never provided the funding for that…
“As Homeland Security pointed out in a memo, ‘A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS secretary since the Department was founded.’ No matter that prior administrations, including Donald Trump’s, have used ‘parole’ to admit citizens from various countries…
“The articles of impeachment complain that the immigration court backlog has more than doubled during Mayorkas’s tenure, ‘destroying the courts’ ability to administer justices and provide appropriate relief in a timeframe that does not run into years or even decades.’… The backlog of immigration cases more than doubled during the Trump administration.”
Ruth Marcus, Washington Post
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) writes, “In October, the Biden administration requested supplemental funding to add asylum officers to process the backlog of asylum claims, add more immigration judges to adjudicate the backlog of cases, add more immigration and law enforcement officials to keep the border orderly and secure and add advanced technology designed to prevent fentanyl and human trafficking over the border. House Republicans flatly rejected this request…
“Democrats, led by Mayorkas and President Joe Biden, have been working around the clock for the past two months with a bipartisan group of senators to address the issues at the border… [But] In a recent closed-door meeting with his Senate Republican colleagues, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky reportedly shared ‘that the party used to be united in finding a solution’ but that the politics ‘have changed’ and Trump ‘wants the issue [of border security] for his 2024 campaign more than an actual solution.’”
Rep. Dan Goldman, MSNBC
