The House last week approved two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a near-unprecedented step to take against a member of a president's cabinet over a policy dispute.
With a narrow 219-212 majority, Republicans will need near unanimity to pass the measures, though even if they do the Democratic-majority Senate is all but certain to acquit Mayorkas.
House Republicans allege that Mayorkas was intentionally lax in securing the long border with Mexico and violated the public trust by making false statements to Congress.
Around 2 million migrants were arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2023.
Mayorkas has denied any wrongdoing and has defended his tenure.
The House vote would play out as the Senate attempts to debate a tough new bipartisan border security bill, which House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday said would be "dead on arrival" in his chamber.
Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has also railed against the bill.
The only other time the House voted to impeach a Cabinet member was in 1876, when a secretary of war was investigated for corruption. The Senate acquitted him.
"Secretary Mayorkas’ actions, both in his intentional refusal to enforce our laws and abandoning the confidence of Americans, require us to act," House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole said on Monday as his panel prepared to set the rules for debating the impeachment charges before the full House.
"If he will not do his duty, then unfortunately, the House must do its constitutional duty," Cole said.
Democrats have condemned the impeachment exercise as an effort to score political points against Biden and his administration in the run-up to the November elections.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the senior Democrat on the panel, called the effort a "pre-planned, predetermined scapegoating of the secretary" made up with "cooked up vague, unprecedented grounds."
Democrats and some legal experts have said the impeachment charges fall well short of evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors" under the Constitution's impeachment requirement.
The chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., opened the meeting, which began Tuesday morning, by saying Mayorkas "has willfully and systematically refused to comply with the laws passed by Congress and breached the trust of Congress and the American people. The results have been catastrophic and have endangered the lives and livelihoods of all Americans."
Referring to the impeachments of Donald Trump in the last Congress, Green said the committee has been "meticulous" in its methodology. "Today is a grave day. We have not approached this day or this process lightly. Secretary Mayorkas’ actions have forced our hand," he said.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the panel, countered in his opening statement that "this is a terrible day for the committee, the United States Constitution and our great country. ... The sham impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is a baseless political stunt by extreme MAGA Republicans."
“In a process akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, Republicans have cooked up vague, unprecedented grounds to impeach Secretary Mayorkas," Thompson continued. "Refusal to follow the law and a breach of public trust — neither of the impeachment charges the committee will consider today are a high crime and misdemeanor under Article II of the Constitution.”
Asked before the hearing whether the allegations against Mayorkas meet the necessary requirements for impeachment, Green responded: “Absolutely.”
Green said he expected “lots of procedural motions” at Tuesday’s hearing and a “united front from our side. The problems with our broken and outdated immigration system are not new. … Our immigration laws were simply not built for 21st century migration patterns,” Mayorkas wrote, noting that he is involved in bipartisan talks with senators to come to an agreement on changes to immigration and asylum laws.
“You claim that we have failed to enforce our immigration laws. That is false,” he added, writing that DHS has provided Congress with “hours of testimony, thousands of documents, hundreds of briefings, and much more information that demonstrates quite clearly how we are enforcing the law. Read More...
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