House Republicans ultimately voted to remove the Secretary of Homeland Security. Alejandro Mayorkas exactly a week after his first attempt failed spectacularly.
The two articles of impeachment accuse President Biden’s top border official, Mayorkas, of flouting immigration law and lying to Congress about the status of the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the first Cabinet official to be impeached in nearly 150 years and now faces a possible trial in the Democratic-controlled Senate, which is expected to acquit him.
The measure passed by just one vote: 214 to 213 after three Republicans, Reps. Ken Buck, R-Colo., Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Tom McClintock, R-Calif., joined Democrats in opposing it. her saying it would be “unconstitutional” and set a “bad precedent” for the Republican Party in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security immediately lashed out at House Republicans for impeaching the secretary while also nullifying the Senate’s immigration and foreign aid agreement.
“House Republicans will be remembered in history for trampling on the Constitution for political gain instead of working to resolve the serious challenges at our border,” said DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg.
“While Secretary Mayorkas helped a group of Republican and Democratic senators develop bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security and obtain the resources needed to enforce the law, House Republicans have wasted months on this baseless and impeachment trial. unconstitutional”.
“History will not look favorably on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship,” President Biden said after the vote.
‘Giving up on real solutions just when they are needed most in order to make politics is not what the American people expect from their leaders. Congress must act to provide me, Secretary Mayorkas, and my administration with the tools and resources necessary to address the situation at the border.”
Republicans tried to pass the resolution last week but failed because they miscalculated the number of Democrats who would attend Majority Leader Steve Scalise for cancer treatment.
They even brought Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., back to vote with a chest and neck brace after a car accident. But Democrats got an unexpected surprise in the middle of the first impeachment vote: Rep. Al Green, D-Texas.
Sitting in a wheelchair and still dressed in his medical gown and without shoes, Green had just undergone surgery, but at the last second he managed to cast the final vote against the DHS secretary’s dismissal.
After last week’s embarrassing failure, House Republicans rushed to pass the resolution on Tuesday, hours before the results of the race to replace the former representative. George Santos in a special election in New York.
If the Democrat wins, he will reduce his slim majority from 219 to 212 in another crucial vote.
House Republicans ultimately voted to remove the Secretary of Homeland Security. Alejandro Mayorkas on his second attempt after last week’s spectacular failure. The articles accuse Mayorkas of flouting U.S. immigration law and lying to Congress about the status of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Scalise, R-Louisiana, returned to Washington after receiving autologous blood stem cell treatment cancer multiple myeloma. He is now in “complete remission.”
“The only way to stop the border invasion is to replace the Biden administration at the polls,” McClintock wrote in political that will one day end. They bite the Republicans.
Moments after last week’s impeachment defeat, a vote to offer Israel $17.6 billion failed to get the two-thirds majority it needed to pass under suspension of the rules.
The articles specifically cite Mayorkas violating U.S. law requiring the detention of immigrants who lack authority to be in the country, exceeding his parole authority by allowing them to live and work in the United States while they wait for their asylum claims to be heard.
Mayorkas has denied such claims and Democrats insist he is only carrying out Biden administration policy.
Border Patrol recorded a record 249,785 arrests on the border with Mexico in December, almost a third more than in November and 13 percent more than the previous record in December 2022.
The last Cabinet secretary to be indicted was Secretary of War William Belknap in 150 years.
Mayorkas blamed the “broken system” on a lack of congressional action after Republicans killed an immigration and foreign aid deal negotiated in the Senate.
“It’s certainly a crisis and, well, we’re not responsible for a broken system,” Mayorkas said. ‘And we are doing a lot within that broken system. But fundamentally, fundamentally, Congress is the only one that can fix it.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Gallagher, one of the Republicans who voted against impeachment, said over the weekend that he would not seek re-election at the end of his term.
“Not only would impeachment fail to resolve Mr. Biden’s border crisis, it would also set a dangerous new precedent that will be used against future Republican administrations,” Gallagher wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the impeachment effort. .
The impeachment trial only needed a simple majority to refer the articles to the Senate, where the upper house can vote against opening a trial with a simple majority.
But even conservative Senate Republicans have called the effort futile.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R.N.D., called it “the dumbest exercise and use of time” last week.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, said impeachment was a “waste” unless it’s President Biden and that Republicans should focus more on making their case to the public in an election year.
House Republicans flatly rejected the Senate’s bipartisan deal on immigration and foreign aid.
Migrants try to cut a barbed wire fence installed to prevent the entry of illegal immigrants across the Rio Bravo/Grande from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on February 12, 2024.
‘What’s interesting to me is that the speaker says that the (border) bill in the Senate is… dead since its arrival. And then they proceed to indict a Cabinet secretary, who is obviously dead on arrival,” Cramer said.
“He’ll be dead when he arrives, but it will still be the same policy even if Mayorkas were gone, because we have the same president,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who spent months negotiating the foreign aid and immigration deal with Democrats.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Senate approved a $95 billion foreign aid deal that includes money for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Taiwan, without the immigration provisions.
President Mike Johnson said he does not plan to introduce the package in the House, calling it “insufficient” without border security measures and saying the Senate “has failed to seize the moment.”
“Now, absent any changes to border policy from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own way through these important issues,” Johnson continued. “America deserves better than the Senate status quo.”
Mayorkas said Sunday that he is not deterred by the Republican Party’s attacks on him.
“These are baseless accusations, Kristen, and that’s why they don’t really distract me from focusing on the work of the Department of Homeland Security,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker.
‘I have a busy day today. After the show, a busy day at work. I have a very busy day on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.’