Wait, Republicans Are Impeaching Whom With the What Now?

Earlier this week, the Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee voted on party lines to recommend the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas. Let’s break it down.

Who?

Alejandro Mayorkas, the United States secretary of homeland security.

They still call it homeland security? Was “consecrated soil of the motherland” security already taken?

The months and years after 9/11 were a time of strong emotions.

OK, first of all, you can impeach a member of the Cabinet?

Yes. It’s happened once before, to Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876. Belknap, who was charged with accepting kickbacks from a government contractor, was acquitted, although he had resigned before his Senate trial began. Incidentally, the official congressional write-up of the affair attributes Belknap’s behavior to the greed of his “luxury-loving” wives in a very anachronistic way. (The woman to whom Belknap was married when the bribery scheme began died of tuberculosis after giving birth in 1870—that does sound a little selfish, hmm—and he remarried in 1873.)

So, who is Mayorkas and what did he allegedly do?

Mayorkas is a former federal prosecutor who held high-level immigration-related roles in the Obama administration before being appointed to his current job by Joe Biden. The articles of impeachment drafted against him by Republicans on the Homeland Security committee say he has “repeatedly violated laws enacted by Congress regarding immigration and border security.” They claim that Mayorkas should be holding every undocumented migrant encountered by border agents in detention while their cases are being processed and that he is violating the law by releasing some of them into the country while they await a ruling on their status.

Is that a fair charge?

People besides Republicans on the Homeland Security committee—including prominent conservative legal commentators and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal—generally agree that it is not. In recent years, starting during the Trump administration, the U.S. has seen an unprecedented surge of attempted migration. There are vastly more people trying to enter the country over its southwest border than there are federal facilities to hold them in, and there are not enough federal officials to handle the many claims of eligibility for asylum that these individuals submit. The backlog of cases in immigration court is yearslong, and both the Biden and Trump administrations have responded to the overload by releasing some migrants while they await adjudication of their status.

Could Mayorkas and Biden simply turn people away without taking their asylum claims?

No—or, at least, a federal court already ruled that this was illegal when Trump tried it in 2018, which is why a bipartisan group in the Senate is reportedly negotiating legislation that would give the president more authority to do so. The bill would also reportedly appropriate money to hire more asylum officers and immigration judges. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, however, says the lower chamber will reject this bill, again on the grounds that Biden and Mayorkas could be doing more under current law.

In addition to their problems on the merits, the articles of impeachment compiled by the committee are sloppy. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute noticed that two of the court cases that Republicans cite to argue that Mayorkas has certain existing authorities were actually reversed on appeal; another section bops the secretary for allegedly terminating an immigration-related program that was actually ended by the State Department, which is controlled by a different member of the Cabinet.

Is the rest of the House going to vote to move forward with impeachment?

Maybe not. Republicans currently hold a 219–213 majority in the chamber, which means they can afford only three defections from their cause, given the strong unlikelihood that any Democrat will vote to impeach. One Republican member has already said he’s a no vote, and others say they are on the fence. And even if the House does impeach Mayorkas, the Democrat-controlled Senate will acquit him. (Recall that a conviction on impeachment charges requires a two-thirds Senate majority.)

So what’s the point of all this?

The single most unrelenting advocate for a Mayorkas impeachment, despite the fact that she does not sit on the committee that impeached him, has been Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is to say that the endeavor does not have a “point” in a way that can probably be understood on a deep level by anyone reading this article. Enjoy your weekend!