The Mayorkas Impeachment Was a Travesty and Dems Were Right to Toss It
House Republicans undermined real action on border security and made a mockery of the impeachment process.
LAST WEEK, THE U.S. SENATE conducted the shortest impeachment trial in American history. On Tuesday, April 17, hours after receiving articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, senators voted along party lines to dismiss them. Republicans claimed that Democrats, by preemptively rejecting the charges, were trying to hide the border crisis. But the dismissal was correct, because the impeachment was preposterous. It was a nakedly political ploy, more damning in what it revealed about the GOP than in what it said about Mayorkas.
The first article of impeachment alleged that Mayorkas “willfully and systemically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws.” It accused him of a “scheme” to release asylum applicants, in defiance of the law’s requirement that such applicants “shall be detained.”
The accusation was comically dishonest. Every time Mayorkas has testified before Congress, he has explained that he doesn’t have enough personnel, equipment, or accommodations to deal with all the migrants he’s supposed to detain. He has pleaded with Republicans to give him what he needs. A few months ago, he helped a bipartisan group of senators craft legislation to solve the problem. But at the behest of Donald Trump—who wanted to preserve chaos at the border because it might get him re-elected to the presidency this fall—House Republican leaders refused to consider the bill, and Senate Republicans killed it. Now they have the gall to blame Mayorkas.
The second article of impeachment alleged that Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements to Congress.” Specifically, the article said he lied by claiming that the border was “secure” and “closed.” These claims by Mayorkas are eye-rollers, but they’re no different from the self-serving overstatements politicians make all the time. President George W. Bush, for example, spoke in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner in May 2003, eight weeks into the Iraq War. Two years later, Bush said his director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, was doing a “heckuva job” on Hurricane Katrina. These were laughable exaggerations. But if they had been delivered under oath, would anyone call them impeachable lies?
The absurdity of the impeachment was on display last Tuesday, just before House managers formally brought the impeachment articles to the Senate. That morning, the House Homeland Security Committee interrogated Mayorkas about the DHS budget. The committee’s Republicans hurled bogus accusations at him—claiming, for example, that he had instructed immigration officers “not to take prior criminal conduct into account when taking enforcement action.” Mayorkas patiently explained that the accusations were false. His interrogators ignored the corrections and repeated their falsehoods.
There was one moment of candor, however, and it came from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She told Mayorkas: “The open border is the Number One issue across America in poll after poll, and that is exactly why this committee impeached you.”
She was right. The impeachment was never about high crimes. It was political theater.
THAT AFTERNOON, shortly after receiving the impeachment articles, Republican senators held a press conference to capitalize on them. “Everyone recognizes the single most endangered Democrat senator on the ballot this year is Jon Tester from Montana,” Sen. Ted Cruz told the assembled reporters. Cruz asserted that “as soon as the managers arrived” with the articles of impeachment, “Tester turned and ran.”
Sen. Roger Marshall followed Cruz to the microphone, reciting a list of swing states where Republicans aim to beat President Joe Biden and unseat Democratic senators. “I certainly just hope that the folks in states like Montana and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, are paying attention,” said Marshall. If Democratic senators from those states refused to put Mayorkas on trial, said Marshall, “we need to hold them accountable in November.”
As the Senate moved on to debate the impeachment, other Republicans joined in the electioneering. Sen. Lindsey Graham said his message “to the American people” about Mayorkas was: “There’ll be an election in November. This is the only chance you have to get this right.” Sen. Ron Johnson vowed, “We’ll continue to prosecute this case right up until November.”
EVEN HOUSE SPEAKER Mike Johnson, who’s getting applause this week for risking his job to send aid to Ukraine, played politics with the Mayorkas impeachment. On Wednesday, after the charges were dismissed, Johnson predicted, “I think there’ll be a reckoning for all this in the election cycle in the fall.” He boasted that Biden would have to “answer to the American people in November. And I think it’s one of the big reasons that Republicans are going to have a very, very good election cycle.”
That evening, Cruz went on Fox News to detail his list of targeted senators: “Jon Tester in Montana voted to hear no evidence. He doesn’t want to know about the failures of the Democrats’ open borders. . . . Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jacky Rosen in Nevada—every one of these Democrats running right now, they want to hide from the issue.”
On Thursday, Marshall went on Newsmax to extend the attack. “We have people that are up for re-election here in November from purple states, senators from purple states like Montana and Ohio, who claim they’re moderates, but then they stand in line to vote like a liberal,” said Marshall. “Ultimately, this is going to be decided in November,” he predicted. “That’s the last chapter of this impeachment trial, when ultimately we go after the goose, the person that’s really doing this. And of course, that’s Joe Biden.”
THE MAYORKAS TRIAL WAS—as Graham colorfully put it during Tuesday’s Senate debate—“a friggin’ joke.” But the joke isn’t that the trial was cut short. The joke is that the trial had to be held at all. Republicans never had a case that Mayorkas had committed high crimes. All they had was a popular issue and a House majority that was willing to abuse the impeachment process for electoral advantage. They demeaned the process, but they succeeded in exposing official corruption. Unfortunately, it was their own.