Washington — The House Homeland Security Committee voted to advance articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday, teeing up a floor vote that could make Mayorkas the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached in nearly 150 years.
After a 15-plus-hour meeting that at times grew contentious, the GOP-led committee voted 18-15 along party lines to advance two impeachment articles to the House floor, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Debate and votes on the the articles are expected next week.
House Republicans on Sunday released the impeachment articles against President Biden’s top immigration official, accusing him of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust” over the administration’s handling of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
GOP Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, the committee’s chairman, said the panel had “exhausted all other options” to hold Mayorkas accountable for defying laws passed by Congress.
“We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer,” he said. “The time for accountability is now.”
House Democrats characterized the impeachment effort as a “sham” and said the articles lack evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors — the constitutional basis for impeachment.
Tuesday’s markup stretched into early Wednesday morning as Democrats sought to delay the meeting by repeatedly requesting recorded votes and raising procedural objections.
“Neither of the impeachment charges the committee will consider today are a high crime or misdemeanor,” Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the committee, said.
The first impeachment article accuses Mayorkas of repeatedly violating the law by allowing the release of migrants who are awaiting court proceedings. The second article alleges Mayorkas lied to lawmakers about whether the southern border was secure and obstructed congressional oversight of the department.
If he is impeached, Mayorkas is all but certain to be acquitted of the charges in a trial in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict and remove him from office. Still, his impeachment would be historic, since he would be just the second Cabinet official to be impeached in U.S. history, and the first in almost 150 years.
The impeachment push comes as the GOP attempts to make border security a central theme of the 2024 campaign. Many House Republicans, however, also oppose an immigration deal aimed at clamping down on illegal border crossings that Mayorkas helped negotiate with a bipartisan group of senators.
The committee meeting
Republicans on the committee refuted the notion that the charges against Mayorkas fail to meet the constitutional threshold for impeachment, arguing that the language could have been interpreted differently at the time of the country’s founding. They said that rather than referring to a criminal offense, a “misdemeanor” would have referred to the act of demeaning oneself — essentially setting a lower bar for impeachment.
But Democrats pushed back on the interpretation. Rep. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island said the Constitution is “very clear that you cannot impeach someone because you think they’re doing a bad job.”
“If that becomes the new precedent, then the floodgates will open and you will have frivolous impeachments from here until the end of time,” Magaziner said.
Democrats also rebuffed the notion that there was no other option than to impeach Mayorkas.
“We’ve heard a lot from my Republican colleagues today about how this is our only option,” Rep. Dan…
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