The Senate this week will take up impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the White House is weighing in, calling the proceedings a “complete waste of time.”
Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, pointed to constitutional law experts who have largely panned the impeachment as lacking constitutional teeth, and he said that given the stated opposition even from some Senate Republicans, the effort isn’t going anywhere.
He said House Republicans got pressured into the impeachment by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who filed multiple sets of impeachment articles and has been one of the most fervent critics of Mr. Mayorkas.
“This effort is a complete waste of time that constitutional and legal experts have said is ‘unconstitutional’ and that even Senate Republicans have made clear they don’t want to focus on,” Mr. Sams said.
The House impeached Mr. Mayorkas in a 214-213 vote in February, but GOP leaders had declined to transmit the two articles to the Senate in the ensuing weeks, saying they wanted to finish up other business including the annual spending bills.
With those out of the way, House Speaker Mike Johnson says it’s now time to force the issue in the Senate, where Democrats are in control.
Mr. Sams called the effort “cynical and outrageous” and said it was a distraction from more important legislative business, such as passing an immigration spending bill that would rewrite the rules on border “parole” cases and tighten some asylum rules.
That legislation was doomed by a bipartisan filibuster in the Senate in February, but President Biden has been demanding Congress revive the bill. He blamed former President Donald Trump, his likely adversary in November’s election, for the bill’s demise.
“So instead of taking action to pass a bipartisan border security bill that they initially demanded, extreme Republicans in the House and Senate killed it,” Mr. Sams said in a memo laying out the White House’s stance ahead of the Senate trial of Mr. Mayorkas. “Now, they want people to think they are serious on the border by pushing a baseless impeachment stunt that legal scholars say is unconstitutional.”
Mr. Johnson is expected to send over the impeachment articles on Wednesday. Senators would be sworn in as a jury on Thursday.
Senate Democrats are pondering a quick move to dismiss the impeachment articles, which would derail an actual trial.
Mr. Mayorkas is the first sitting Cabinet secretary in history to be impeached. In the 1870s, the War Department secretary resigned before impeachment, but the House impeached him anyway and the Senate held a trial, acquitting him in large part because senators said he was out of office and beyond their reach.
Mr. Mayorkas has been defiant in the face of his impeachment and has shown no indication he will step down.
Given the partisan breakdown in the Senate, it is unthinkable that the chamber would muster the two-thirds vote needed to convict and oust Mr. Mayorkas. But Rep. Mark Green, who led the House impeachment inquiry as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said senators owe the country a trial.
“In every previous instance in which the Senate has had the opportunity to conduct an impeachment trial, it has done so. Dismissing a trial in one form or another would be not only an abdication of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to take this matter seriously, but an affront to the millions of Americans suffering from the fallout of the ongoing crisis,” he wrote in an op-ed last week for Fox News.
The articles of impeachment accuse Mr. Mayorkas of breaching the public’s trust by lying about immigration matters and of intentionally subverting immigration enforcement laws, leading to the worst border mess in U.S. history.
The numbers tell much of that story.
In December 2020, the last full month under Mr. Trump, Customs and Border Protection nabbed roughly 75,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border. Fewer than 1,000 were caught and released, according to Trump officials.
This past December, under Mr. Biden, CBP tallied more than 300,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border. Mr. Mayorkas has estimated that more than 85%, or more than 255,000, were caught and released.