On its second try, the US House of Representatives impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote, in a process some Jewish groups said was tainted by antisemitic rhetoric.
The impeachment of Mayorkas, who is Jewish, passed Tuesday on party lines by a vote of 214-213, with three Republicans breaking ranks. The effort, however, is likely going nowhere, because the Democratic-led Senate may not take it up, and if it does, there are nowhere near the 67 votes necessary to convict and remove Mayorkas, the first cabinet secretary impeached in nearly 150 years.
Lawmakers passed two articles accusing him of “willful and systemic refusal” to enforce immigration law and “breach of public trust.
The House voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday, after an embarrassing failed attempt from House Republicans last week as they seek to make the crisis on the southern border a top 2024 issue.
The vote passed mostly along party lines by a count of 214-213, with no Democrats supporting the effort and a few GOP lawmakers joining them. Until Tuesday evening’s vote, the House had not impeached a cabinet secretary in almost 150 years.
The crux of House Republicans’ allegations against Mayorkas, whom they have long sought to impeach, is that the secretary deliberately and willfully allowed the crisis on the southern border to reach an extreme state.
"With this vote, Congress has made clear that we will not tolerate such lawlessness," chair of the GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee Mark Green, R-Tenn., said in a statement after the House's vote. Following Tuesday’s impeachment vote, Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a liberal community relations body, noted in a statement how the theory has in recent years spurred mass murders, including a number targeting Jews.
“We’ve seen the deadly consequences of the ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement’ rhetoric that underpinned this impeachment effort – directly fueling violence in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso, Buffalo, and beyond,” Spitalnick said, referencing a string of attacks by white nationalists in recent years. “This dehumanizing bigotry puts all our lives at risk, yet House leaders once again cynically doubled down on it to score political points while making our communities less safe.
Secretary Mayorkas has willfully and consistently refused to comply with federal immigration laws, fueling the worst border catastrophe in American history,” Johnson said in a statement after the vote.
Democrats say Mayorkas is carrying out a policy that does not meet any criminal standard, and that he has scored successes.
“Make no mistake — the Secretary has not committed an impeachable offense,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Jewish New Yorker who is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said on X, formerly Twitter. “Republicans don’t want to fix the border, they want to do Trump’s bidding and use it as a campaign issue.”
Former US president Donald Trump, who is running again this year, urged Republicans to impeach Mayorkas. He also urged his party to reject a bipartisan border security compromise negotiated in the Senate.
Mayorkas, who did not appear to testify before the impeachment proceedings, put the border crisis squarely on Congress for failing to update immigration laws during a time of global migration.
“There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border,” Mayorkas said over the weekend on NBC. “And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it.
The timing of the vote was significant. If a special election Tuesday in a Long Island district sends a Democrat to the House, impeachment likely would not have been possible.
Conservatives in the House of Representatives blame Mayorkas for a surge in illegal entries from Mexico that they have called a “humanitarian catastrophe.”
Republicans botched the first impeachment effort by wrongly anticipating how many lawmakers would be present on each side and losing by just one vote.
Tuesday’s rerun was just as close, but the return of Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who had been receiving cancer treatment, swung the chamber the other way.
“Next to a declaration of war, impeachment is arguably the most serious authority given to the House and we have treated this matter accordingly,” said House Speaker Johnson. “Since this secretary refuses to do the job that the Senate confirmed him to do, the House must act.”
Biden immediately rebuked Republicans for what he termed a “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.
Seen as the political equivalent of an indictment, the rebuke is largely symbolic, however, as Mayorkas is certain to be acquitted at his trial in the Democratic-led Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat-New York, called the case against Mayorkas a “sham impeachment” and a “new low for House Republicans.”
The vote came amid a showdown between the House and the Senate over curbing a surge in illegal immigration, which hit a record 10,000 apprehensions a day at the US-Mexico border in December.
Pandora’s box’
House Republicans have been accused of acting in bad faith in the impeachment, especially after coming out against a bipartisan deal hammered out in the upper chamber that would have imposed the toughest asylum and border policies in decades.
“House Republicans will be remembered by history for trampling on the Constitution for political gain rather than working to solve the serious challenges at our border,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Twenty-five legal experts called the push “utterly unjustified” in an open letter and were echoed by constitutional scholars who have spoken in Congress against Trump’s impeachments, including Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz.
House Democrats voted in unison against the impeachment, which was also vehemently opposed by the White House.
Ehrenberg at the DHS accused Republicans of havin
The evening roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary facing charges in nearly 150 years.
In a historic rebuke, the House impeached Mayorkas 214-213. With the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise to bolster the GOP’s numbers after being away from Washington for cancer care and a Northeastern storm impacting some others, Republicans recouped — despite dissent from their own ranks.
Johnson had posted a fists-clenched photo with Scalise, announcing his remission from cancer, saying, “looking forward to having him back in the trenches this week. Read More Continue
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