Homeland Security Secretary Facing Impeachment for Bad Vibes
Plus: Has a GOP congressional candidate been stealing cooking photos?
Republicans are moving forward with plans to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The basis of this impeachment is not alleged criminal activity, but rather an alleged failure to do his job.
The House Homeland Security Committee is slated to hold its first hearing in the impeachment process next Wednesday. The key components of the impeachment are “dereliction of duty” and Mayorkas’s “waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars.”
This impeachment is similar to the ongoing, often flailing inquiry into President Joe Biden in that it is nakedly political. The main difference has to do with House Republicans’ approach. The case against Biden is a fishing expedition for crimes, leading the relevant committee chairmen—Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan—to hop from scheme to scheme à la Pinky and the Brain. Nothing seems to stick on Biden.
But getting an allegation of wrongdoing to stick isn’t even part of the equation for Mayorkas. Republicans are instead making the case that Mayorkas is bad at his job, and that itself is the crime. It’s not a real crime, of course—but it’s spurring potentially infinite crime by allowing the border to remain “wide open.” The argument is that any of his deliberate actions in the area of border policy and enforcement that have resulted in drugs, violence, and general crime proliferating across the United States are impeachable offenses. It’s hard to come up with parallels for an impeachment of this kind in actual history, but the counterfactual parallel would be if Democrats had impeached Mike Brown, the FEMA administrator under President George W. Bush, for his horrendous handling of the Hurricane Katrina response.1