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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
House sends Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate
By Annie Grayer and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Updated:
8:03 PM EDT, Tue April 16, 2024
Source: CNN
House Republicans have sent to the Senate two articles of impeachment
against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a step that
launches a trial in the Senate as GOP lawmakers seek to highlight
President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy.
The Democratic-controlled Senate, however, is expected to quickly
dismiss the charges without a trial or conduct a speedy trial that ends
without a conviction.
Mayorkas, who took the helm at the start of the Biden administration,
is the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached in nearly 150 years.
House Republicans Mayorkas in February over his handling of the
southern border by a narrow margin after failing to do so on their
first try.
Republicans targeted Mayorkas as soon as they took control of the House
last year, blaming the high number of border crossings on the Homeland
Security secretary as the party faced pressure from its base to hold
the Biden administration accountable on a key campaign issue.
Multiple constitutional experts, however, have said the evidence
Republicans have put forward does not reach the high bar set by the US
Constitution of high crimes and misdemeanors. Democrats have argued
that the impeachment proceedings have been politically motivated and
meritless.
The issue now moves to the Senate where Democratic senators — joined
by some Republicans — have said they expect the chamber will move to
dismiss the case before a full trial.
If it does not get dismissed outright, Senate Majority Leader Chuck
Schumer announced Tuesday evening that senators will be sworn in at 1
p.m. Wednesday as jurors in the proceeding.
The tumultuous way the impeachment process against Mayorkas has played
out has led many Republicans to grow even more skeptical about the
prospects of impeaching Biden, arguably their top investigative target
this Congress. House Republicans do not have the votes or concrete
evidence to impeach Biden given their razor-thin majority, leaving that
separate impeachment inquiry .
Mayorkas has pushed back against criticism of his leadership, and DHS
has the impeachment effort against him a baseless political attack.
“Despite warnings from fellow Republicans that this baseless
impeachment effort ‘distorts the Constitution,’ House Republicans
continue to ignore the facts and undermine the Constitution by wasting
even more time on this sham impeachment in the Senate,” a DHS
spokesperson said in a statement.
Republicans have targeted Mayorkas in an effort to attack Biden
and his administration’s handling of the southern border. With border
crossings and US cities across the country struggling to manage
the influx of migrants, immigration has been a political vulnerability
for Biden.
But the White House is trying to flip the script, citing Republicans
blocking a bipartisan border deal as evidence that the party isn’t
serious about border security.
After months of negotiations, Senate Republicans earlier this year
that would have marked a tough change to immigration law and would have
given the president far-reaching powers to restrict illegal migrant
crossings at the southern border. The legislation was aimed at closing
loopholes in the asylum process, limiting the use of parole for
migrants and giving the president new authority to essentially shut
down the border to migrants when attempted crossings got too high.
The deal faced relentless attacks from former President Donald Trump
and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, who said the
bill would be dead on arrival in his chamber - if it ever made it out
of the Senate. Trump, who has made immigration a key plank of his
presidential campaign, on Truth Social that approving additional
resources for the border would make Republicans “look bad.”
Referring to the Mayorkas impeachment proceedings, White House
counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams wrote in a memo, “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.”
“But the worst part is that extreme Republicans have promoted this
silly, baseless stunt at the same time they have killed an actual
bipartisan border security bill that would have addressed the
challenges at the border and delivered needed resources to DHS,” he
continued.
GOP arguments for impeachment and pushback from constitutional experts
When Johnson originally informed Schumer he would be sending the
impeachment articles over to the Senate, he laid out why he believed a
Mayorkas impeachment was justified. Johnson claimed that Mayorkas
directed department employees to violate US immigration laws and argued
that the administration’s use of parole authority was unlawful.
House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green of Tennessee who led the
House investigation into Mayorkas argued the secretary committed high
crimes and misdemeanors that amount to impeachable offenses.
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” Green said in a
statement provided to CNN. “He has willfully and systemically refused
to comply with immigration laws enacted by Congress. He has breached
the public trust by knowingly making false statements to Congress and
the American people, and obstructing congressional oversight of his
department.”
And he has cited Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, arguing that he
has indicated Congress could “employ the weapons of inter-branch
warfare,” including impeachment, in light of a Supreme Court ruling
that states could not challenge federal immigration law.
Democrats have slammed the impeachment effort, saying that policy
disagreements are not a justification for the rarely used
constitutional impeachment of a Cabinet official.
Legal scholars have also poured cold water on the legal arguments
Republicans are using to support their impeachment effort.
Ross Garber, a Tulane University law professor who has represented many
Republican officeholders as both the prosecution and defense in
impeachment cases, told CNN that House Republicans have not presented
evidence of impeachable offenses.
“I think that what the House Republicans are asserting is that
Secretary Mayorkas is guilty of maladministration,” Garber said.
“At least as framed right now, the charges don’t rise to the level
of a high crime or misdemeanor.”
Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under Republican
President George W. Bush, wrote in an op-ed, “as a former federal
judge, U.S. attorney and assistant attorney general — I can say with
confidence that, for all the investigating that the House Committee on
Homeland Security has done, they have failed to put forth evidence that
meets the bar.”
Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley, who has been called by
Republicans to serve as a witness in hearings, said: “There is no
current evidence he is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense.”
More than two dozen law professors wrote in an open letter that
impeaching Mayorkas would be “utterly unjustified as a matter of
constitutional law.”
Questions remain over Senate trial
The question now for Senate Democratic leadership is what a trial will
look like and how exactly they will handle the impeachment articles.
While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not specified exactly
how he plans to handle the trial procedurally, the Senate could pass a
motion to dismiss or table the articles on a simple majority vote on
Thursday, the same day senators are sworn in. But some hard-right
Republican senators are trying to find a way to force a full trial.
Schumer has previously said that they will wrap up the impeachment
trial “as quickly as possible,” but he did not say if he will move
to dismiss or table the articles.
Even if the Senate does not vote to quickly dismiss, it is highly
doubtful the chamber would vote to convict Mayorkas, which would
require a two-thirds majority vote – an exceedingly high bar to
clear.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin noted that he thinks it will be over
“quickly,” and that several Republicans have indicated to him that
they don’t support convicting Mayorkas.
“I’m not sure how Chuck’s going to approach it. There’s two or
three procedural opportunities,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju. “I
think it will be done quickly. I’ve talked to some Republicans who
candidly don’t – they don’t take it very seriously.”
Republican Whip John Thune said that Senate Democrats running for
reelection in red states would be in a “difficult position” if they
vote to dismiss impeachment charges against Mayorkas when that trial
gets underway.
Voting to dismiss would make Democrats appear they are turning a
“deaf ear and blind eye” to the crisis at the border, he said.
He said he expects a “large majority” of Republicans to vote to
have a full trial. But he also acknowledged that it’s unlikely all
Republicans will vote together on that question and that some
Republicans will join Democrats to dismiss the case.
Johnson has called on Schumer to not dismiss the articles quickly.
“We call upon you to fulfill your constitutional obligation to hold
this trial” Johnson wrote to Schumer last month. “To table articles
of impeachment without ever hearing a single argument or reviewing a
piece of evidence would be a violation of our constitutional order and
an affront to the American people whom we all serve.”
Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington,
will oversee the proceedings.
In addition to Green, the other House Republicans tapped to serve as
impeachment managers in the Senate include: Reps. Michael McCaul of
Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Ben Cline of
Virginia, Michael Guest of Mississippi, Andrew Garbarino of New York,
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, August Pfluger of Texas, Harriet
Hageman of Wyoming and Laurel Lee of Florida.
CNN’s Ted Barrett and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.
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