If governing amid the chaos of migrants crossing the southern border is an impeachable crime (it is not), then it is members of Congress, mostly Republicans, who deserve condemnation, not a Cabinet secretary.
They, along with deceased legislators of recent decades, are responsible for our dysfunctional immigration system: Congress has consistently failed to provide immigration officials with sufficient funding and legal power to orderly stop, examine, and process the growing number of people yearning for opportunity in the United States. The border problem is not new, it is just worse than ever.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
As the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, says said Senate Republican critics last year: “Our asylum system is broken, our entire immigration system is broken and desperately needs reform. And it has been like that for years and years.”
But instead of taking some responsibility and addressing the problem, House Republicans are skinning a scapegoat – Mayorkas – for their own election-year advantage and that of their master and master, likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The full House is expected to vote next week on the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas that the National Security Committee approved along partisan lines Tuesday night.
If enough so-called moderate Republicans agree, the resolution would move to the Democratic-controlled Senate, which will undoubtedly acquit Mayorkas because the charges of dereliction of duty are false. Still, House Republicans would put on a horse-and-dog show in an election year over an issue that has become a hot topic. main concern for votersparticularly the MAGA base of his party.
However, politics is stupid: why focus on Mayorkas and not his boss? Here's why: Because they don't have the assets or the votes to impeach President Biden. South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said the quiet part out loud when explained in November that his fellow Republicans “should focus on what they can get: Mayorkas is easier than impeaching the president of the United States.”
Open politicking by Republicans in removing a Cabinet secretary for the second time in American history is bad enough. “Get some popcorn,” said Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tennessee. told party donors Last April, he added: “It's going to be fun.”
What is doubly damning is that they are accusing Mayorkas even as they are allied with Trump to kill. a bipartisan bill that the Cabinet secretary negotiated with senators from both parties, and that would be the toughest immigration law in living memory, with additional billions for just what Republicans say they want: more border security.
Since President Reagan signed a landmark immigration law in 1986, Congress has been unable to agree on policies to better control immigration waves, even though presidents of both parties did everything they could to get new laws. signed and more approved funds. Republicans condemned the compromises under Presidents George W. Bush and obama.
Bush's second-term Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, highlighted Congress' dismal record when he came to Mayorkas' defense this week in a Wall Street Journal. opinion article. Despite insufficient resources, the Department of Homeland Security under Mayorkas “removed, returned or expelled” more immigrants by the end of 2023 than in any similar period in the last decade, he wrote.
“The truth is that our national immigration system is outdated, and DHS leaders from both parties have done everything they can to manage our immigration system without adequate support from Congress…” Chertoff added. “House Republicans are ducking a difficult political job and a hard-fought compromise.”
Chertoff is also a former federal judge, lending weight to his charge that Republicans “have not presented evidence that meets the requirements” to charge Mayorkas under the “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause of the Constitution. In that, he echoed other conservative lawyers who know the difference between legal evidence and political nonsense, including Jonathan Turley, the go-to constitutional authority for Republicans and Fox News. “Being bad at your job is not an impeachable crime,” Turley saying by Mayorkas.
In fact, the Republican resolution alleging the secretary's “deliberate and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and abuse of the public trust is nothing more than lip service to what is actually a run-of-the-mill political disagreement.
“Mayorkas is carrying out President Biden's policies. “That’s what a secretary is going to do.” saying Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican in closed-door negotiations for a border bill. “Until we change the law… we're going to have the same results.”
Given their slim majority in the House, Republicans can only lose two votes on the impeachment resolution if the count falls along partisan lines, and several Republicans are undecided. Rep. Tom McClintock, one of several California Republicans running in swing districts, wrote his constituents late last year that the framers of the Constitution explicitly rejected “maladministration, misconduct, and dereliction of duty” as impeachable offenses.
Mayorkas is not even guilty of mismanagement. An immigrant himself (he came to the United States as a baby when his parents fled Castro's Cuba), he has lived the American dream, rising to become the widely respected (except by partisans) head of the department in charge of immigration.
As Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-Rhode Island, said, noted During the House impeachment committee debate, Congress so inadequately funded border security that Mayorkas, like his predecessors, had to use its discretion to determine how many immigrants to detain and which ones. “In the last two years of the Trump administration,” Magaziner said, “52% of migrants detained at the southern border were released, not detained. … I didn’t hear my Republican colleagues trying to impeach the secretary” then.
No they did not. And they shouldn't do it now. Instead, they should act as legislators and legislate: solve problems, not campaign on them when they get worse.
