Cruz: Senate GOP leadership should show ‘some backbone’ in bringing up Mayorkas impeachment trial

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday called on his GOP colleagues in the upper chamber to demonstrate “some backbone” and push for an impeachment trial for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was impeached by the GOP-led House last week.

Mayorkas became the first Cabinet official to be impeached since the 1870s in last Tuesday’s 214-213 vote, which followed a first failed vote.

The articles are not expected to move in the Democrat-led Senate, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) office said last week the chamber would take up the articles when it returns on Feb. 26.

“I got to tell you, with the Mayorkas impeachment, you know what Schumer wants to do? He doesn’t even want to have a trial,” Cruz said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “He doesn’t even want to have senators vote on guilty or not guilty. What he’s trying to do is simply table it, just put it aside.”

“In over 200 years of our nation’s history, the Senate has never once tabled articles of impeachment. That has never happened. Every single time, the Senate has voted, has voted on either guilt or innocence, or the House has withdrawn the impeachment,” he continued.

Cruz argued the situation provides an opportunity for the GOP leadership in the Senate to push back against criticism.

“And I got to say, look, if Republican leadership in the Senate doesn’t like the criticism, here’s an opportunity to demonstrate some backbone. They could stand up and say, let’s have a trial. They can stand up and say, you cannot refuse to even follow the constitutional process for impeachment. You can’t dodge responsibility,” he said.

Schumer responded to Cruz’s remarks on Sunday, arguing the Texas Republican is the “one who wants to do nothing on the border.”

“Last week, Sen. Cruz voted against a bipartisan bill to strengthen border security,” Schumer wrote in a statement to The Hill, in reference to the Senate’s bipartisan border security package that would’ve also unlocked aid for Ukraine. The bill failed in a vote amid GOP opposition.

House Republicans, in their impeachment of the Homeland Security head, accused Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and claimed he violated immigration laws by failing to detain a sufficient number of migrants. 

The articles also accuse Mayorkas of “breach of public trust,” an allegation based in part on misleading claims about Mayorkas’s interactions with Congress and his response to subpoenas from the House Homeland Security Committee. The articles also said he “failed to take action to fulfill his statutory duty to control the border.”

No administration has ever detained all migrants, with various immigration law experts determining earlier this month that Mayorkas did not violate any laws and is faced with the same difficult choices as those of past administrations regarding whom they can detain, The Hill previously reported.

Some Senate Republicans have also dismissed the impeachment effort.  

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), a member of the Senate GOP leadership team, said last month, “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.”

Updated at 3:23 pm.