House impeaches Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

 

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Fox News/Getty.

The House has impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for the dysfunction on the border. Fox News. Mayorkas barely avoided being impeached in the last vote, but he was impeached in a razor thin 214-213 vote. Three Republicans voted against impeaching Mayorkas. It's likely that the impeachment will not do much as it is likely to die in the Senate. Mayorkas faced two charges, one for breaking federal immigration law and another for breaking the public trust. 

My Comment:

This is a very minor win for Republicans in Congress. It will do nothing to actually get rid of Mayorkas, this is DOA in the Senate, but it will be a very slight morale boost for Republicans across the country. It's more about sending a message than anything else. 

Did Mayorkas deserve this? Absolutely! He's done absolutely nothing to secure the border and has essentially abandoned his duties in terms of immigration. His actions were so over the top that it was of course the right thing to impeach him. 

On the other hand, there was quite a bit of embarrassment with the effort. The first vote failed as there were three Republican defectors and Republican Steve Scalise was too sick from cancer treatment to vote. These constant defections on critical bills like this is absolutely hurting the Republican party. And you never see this from Democrats, they almost always vote in unison on critical votes like this. 

What is shocking to me is that my own congressman, Mike Gallagher, voted against the impeachment. Supposedly he didn't think Mayorkas did not meet the standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors" despite breaking federal immigration law. Until now I was fairly happy with Gallagher and would have voted for him in 2024 if he was running, but it's an extremely baffling action by him and might be a reason why he's not going to run in 2024. He had already drawn a primary challenger and with his actions on this issue he probably would have lost. 

I also don't think that arguments that this will make things worse are really valid. The Democrats have already proven they will try and impeach Republicans for absolutely nothing, they impeached Trump twice for zero legitimate reason. The cow is out of the barn on that so there really isn't any downside. 

A more valid criticism is that this was pretty pointless. Just like the Democrats impeachments of Trump, there is zero chance that Mayorkas is going to be removed. Though there is little else for Republicans to focus on right now with the Senate being deadlocked, perhaps they could have been working on doing something for American citizens. But given that the Democrats would not pass anything that the House came up with in the Senate I guess they might as well do this.