GOP tees up second go at Mayorkas impeachment
House Republicans are giving their effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas another try Tuesday, bringing the vote to the floor a second time after three GOP members sided with Democrats to tank their first attempt.
The return of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who has been undergoing treatment for blood cancer, will give House Republicans a pivotal extra vote that, assuming a full slate of Democrats, will give the GOP just enough votes to pass the measure.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) shared a photo of the two, saying Scalise would be “back in the trenches this week.”
Losing last week’s vote was a surprise to Republicans, as Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) left his hospital bed to lend his vote to killing the resolution.
Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) then switched his vote in a procedural move that allows for it to be reconsidered, making the final vote 214-216.
The impeachment is a top GOP priority — one continually championed from the party’s right wing — but its articles are unusual.
They accuse Mayorkas of violating immigration law by failing to detain enough migrants, and say he “violated the public trust.”
Immigration law experts have said Mayorkas’s implementation of the statutes was not unlawful.
Mayorkas, during a Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press,” called the arguments “baseless allegations.”
The Department of Homeland Security ahead of the vote Tuesday released a memo showing the numerous conservative voices that have opposed the impeachment effort — lawmakers, top legal scholars and former heads of the department, including one Republican.
“House Republicans’ baseless push to impeach Secretary Mayorkas has already failed once, with bipartisan opposition,” the department wrote in the memo.
“If Members of Congress care about our national security, they should listen to their fellow Republicans and stop wasting time on this pointless, unconstitutional impeachment – time that could be spent addressing the issue by advancing bipartisan legislation to fix our broken immigration laws and provide needed resources for border security.”
The Republican members who voted “no” had been highly critical in their opposition — writing op-eds and releasing memos suggesting their colleagues were abusing power.
Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) took prominent stands against the bill before the first vote, with the Colorado Republican casting the effort as “pushing a partisan impeachment not based on what the Constitution actually states.”
McClintock wrote a 10-page memo arguing Republicans were reversing on the standard they used when evaluating former President Trump’s impeachment, likewise noting his colleagues had failed to find evidence of a crime.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) warned Republicans they would be haunted by hypocrisy in supporting the resolution and argued his colleagues failed to meet the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors laid out in the Constitution.
“Incompetence doesn’t rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors. The proponents of impeachment concede that the framers rejected the idea that policy disputes or ‘maladministration’ constitute grounds for impeachment,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal shared shortly after his surprise “no” vote.
“The articles of impeachment even tacitly admit there are other options available to Congress,” he added, noting a Supreme Court opinion that sided with the Biden administration in upholding their detention policy encouraged congressional oversight and legislation as a way to confront the executive branch.
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