Republican impeachment of Mayorkas fails amid GOP defections

WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives rejected impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday after a small group of Republicans broke with their party and refused to support what amounted to a partisan indictment of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

The 216-214 vote dealt a stunning defeat to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who had expressed confidence that he had the votes to charge Mayorkas with high crimes and misdemeanors for failing to lock down the U.S. border with Mexico amid a migrant surge, a move that Republicans have been promising for more than a year.

In an extraordinary scene on the House floor, Republican leaders held the vote open for several minutes as they scrambled to corral the necessary votes to approve the charges, as Democrats jeered and yelled “Order!” and the tally hovered at a tie. In the end, three Republican defections – by Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California – were enough to sink the measure.

Last week, the House Homeland Security Committee approved two articles that charged him with refusing to comply with the law and breaching the public trust. But it was only over the past few weeks that Republican leaders, under pressure from the hard right, rushed the impeachment through the committee and to the floor – without ever ensuring they had the requisite support to pass it given their minuscule House majority.

The charges earned immediate and overwhelming condemnation from Democrats, former secretaries of homeland security and constitutional law experts – including several conservatives – who argued that Republicans were trying to spin a policy dispute into a constitutional indictment, with no evidence that Mayorkas’ conduct rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The House’s impeachment vote unfolded as a Senate effort to pass a bipartisan national security supplemental package that would crack down on border crossings was unraveling – a fate that House Republican leaders helped to bring about. For weeks, Johnson has been warning that the Senate bill, which Mayorkas helped to negotiate, would be “dead on arrival” in the House, dissuading many Senate Republicans from supporting the measure.

The remarkable defeat came on a day of striking dysfunction on Capitol Hill at the hands of Republicans. They torpedoed a bipartisan border deal they had demanded, leaving the fate of aid to Ukraine and Israel in peril even as President Joe Biden pleaded with Congress to approve it. Then they tried to preempt that measure by putting forward a bill to send aid to Israel only, but that too failed amid opposition from their hard-right flank and Democrats who called it a ploy to kill the broader effort to help Ukraine.

Democrats warned that Republicans would suffer political consequences for the move, which they said amounted to pursuing a political vendetta. “If House Republicans are serious about border security, they should abandon these political games, and instead support the bipartisan national security agreement in the Senate,” Mia Ehrenberg, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

It was unclear how Republicans planned to regroup after the defeat, given how much capital leaders had placed on pursuing the impeachment charges – and how politically important the issue of the border is expected to be for the party in an election year. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, switched his vote to “no” and moved to reconsider the matter, which would allow leaders to bring it up again at another time if they manage to persuade holdouts to change their minds. Republicans said they would do so as early as Wednesday, bringing back Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the party’s second-ranking leader who was absent Tuesday while undergoing cancer treatment, to ensure they could win a majority.

Critics of the case pointed out that attempting to remove the secretary was unlikely to bring about a change in the Biden administration’s border policies, and would not suddenly equip officials with the powers and resources they need to do a more effective job at carrying out the nation’s border enforcement laws.