House Republicans on Tuesday narrowly secured a historic vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, rallying GOP members after a first failed effort.
Mayorkas is the first Cabinet official to be impeached since the 1870s, a vote made all the more remarkable by Republicans’ inability to pass the same articles of impeachment last week, when three GOP members joined Democrats to tank the resolution, citing concerns their colleagues were abusing their impeachment power.
The articles are not expected to move in the Democrat-led Senate.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described the vote as advancing “without a shred of evidence or legitimate Constitutional grounds.”
Tuesday’s 214-213 vote is a recovery from an embarrassing speed bump for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), whose fractious conference — particularly Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — had made impeaching Mayorkas a priority as they seek to make the border a central issue ahead of November.
“Alejandro Mayorkas deserves to be impeached, and Congress has a constitutional obligation to do so,” Johnson said in a statement after the vote.
Johnson had to contend with a razor-thin majority, a vote in New York Tuesday night that could narrow that majority even further, and a storm that threatened to keep Republicans from the Capitol.
The vote was made possible only by the return of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who missed last week’s vote while undergoing treatment for blood cancer. Republican leadership brought the vote to the floor last Tuesday thinking they had enough members to clinch a win, only to be surprised by the return of Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who left the hospital bed where he was recovering from surgery to cast his “no” vote in a dramatic twist.
Republicans did not face such obstacles to their second vote, though they still lost the backing of the same trio of their colleagues, including Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who announced over the weekend he would no longer seek reelection. Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) also remained opposed.
“House Republicans will be remembered by history for trampling on the Constitution for political gain rather than working to solve the serious challenges at our border. While Secretary Mayorkas was helping a group of Republican and Democratic Senators develop bipartisan solutions to strengthen border security and get needed resources for enforcement, House Republicans have wasted months with this baseless, unconstitutional impeachment,” DHS spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.
“Without a shred of evidence or legitimate Constitutional grounds, and despite bipartisan opposition, House Republicans have falsely smeared a dedicated public servant who has spent more than 20 years enforcing our laws and serving our country. Secretary Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security will continue working every day to keep Americans safe.”
The GOP held the vote Tuesday night on a fly-in day, the same day former Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) was on the ballot in New York to regain his old seat following the removal of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.). A delayed vote and a victory by Suozzi risked more closely balancing the chamber’s numbers and the possibility of a tie vote — which would be a loss — on the measure.
The House did not debate the articles for a second time on Tuesday. Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) changed his vote to “no” last week in a procedural move that allowed for speedy reconsideration.
But when the bill was considered last week, the GOP cast migrants as a threat to the nation while blaming Mayorkas for fentanyl deaths.
“He’s disregarding the laws that this body passed, basically disregarding the institution in the United States Congress, disregarding the Constitution in of itself, which says we write the laws and they execute them,” House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who led the investigation into Mayorkas, said after leaving the vote.
“He should enforce and detain everybody, and he’s not been doing that. And so we’ve held him accountable tonight.”
The GOP case for impeachment is an unusual one, spurring criticism from conservative legal scholars as well as the opposing Republican lawmakers who argued their colleagues did not meet the bar for impeachment.
Republicans accuse Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” claiming he violated immigration laws by failing to detain a sufficient number of migrants.
But no administration has ever detained all migrants, and immigration law experts who have weighed the claim determined Mayorkas did not violate any laws and is making the same tough choices past administrations have grappled with about whom they have the resources to detain.
The articles also accuse him of “breach of public trust,” which includes misleading claims about Mayorkas’s interactions with Congress and his response to subpoenas from the House Homeland Security Committee. It also says he “failed to take action to fulfill his statutory duty to control the border.”
Democrats have argued the articles fall well short of the standard for impeachment and noted the policies Republicans are impeaching him over have been upheld in court.
“After Extreme MAGA Republicans’ first impeachment vote turned into an epic fail on the House floor last week, the tainted vote tonight was an absolute travesty,” Rep. Bennie Thomspon (D-Miss.) said in a statement, adding that he was sure the Senate would ignore the vote.
“Instead of providing the Department of Homeland Security the resources it needs or working together towards a bipartisan solution, they have rejected any solution for the sole reason that they can have a political wedge issue in an election year,” he added.
“History will judge what Republicans did tonight, and it won’t be favorably. They threw the integrity of the House, the Constitution, as well as any glimmer of hope of working together, under the bus.”
The Republican voices that opposed the articles expressed concerns the bill ran afoul of the standards laid out in the Constitution, saying Mayorkas’s job performance did not amount to a crime.
“Maladministration or incompetence does not rise to what our founders considered an impeachable offense,” Buck wrote in an op-ed for The Hill last week.
And McClintock released a 10-page memo outlining his concerns with the impeachment push.
“The logic should be obvious. A cabinet secretary’s job is to carry out the will of the president. How can he be impeached for not doing his job because he is doing it?” McClintock wrote, blaming President Biden for the state of the border.
Mayorkas’s case is dramatically different from the first cabinet official to be impeached. Secretary of War William Belknap resigned from his post amid allegations he accepted kickbacks related to a lucrative military trading post, kicking off accusations of corruption.
It’s likewise not clear whether the articles will get much consideration in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)’s office said Tuesday evening the chamber would take up the articles when it returns on Feb. 26.
“Senators will be sworn in as jurors in the trial the next day. Senate President Pro Tempore Patty Murray will preside,” his office added.
Senate Republicans have also been much more openly dismissive of the impeachment effort than their House counterparts.
“We’ve got so many things to do, I don’t think impeachment was something intended to be brought up every three months or every two months,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), a member of the Senate GOP leadership team, said last month.
Mychael Schnell contributed. Updated at 9:17 p.m.