When senators return from recess this week, they must take care of the 2 articles of impeachment in opposition to Homeland Safety Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that Home Republicans handed final month.
On Wednesday, 11 Republican Home impeachment managers will deliver the 2 articles of impeachment to the Senate, the place Majority Chief Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., must resolve whether or not to carry a trial or vote to dismiss the fees. to submit or reject. .
“The Senate will host the managers as they current the articles of impeachment for Secretary Mayorkas to the Senate,” Schumer wrote in a letter to his caucus on Friday. “Please notice that each one senators will likely be sworn in as jurors within the trial the day after the articles are offered.”
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., would preside over an impeachment trial, Schumer stated.
However Schumer may even have the Senate vote on dismissing the fees with no trial.
Schumer has known as the articles of impeachment a “sham.” The White Home has taken the identical place, calling the trouble to oust Mayorkas politically motivated and “baseless.”
“This effort is an entire waste of time that constitutional and authorized specialists have stated is ‘unconstitutional’ and that even Senate Republicans have made clear they don’t wish to concentrate on,” stated White Home spokesman Ian Sams for surveillance and investigations. e-mail.
Democrats have additionally accused Republicans of utilizing Mayorkas’ impeachment as a marketing campaign problem this fall.
Skinny masses
It took Republicans two makes an attempt to oust Mayorkas, in the end making him the primary Cupboard official to be impeached in practically 150 years.
The one Cupboard official in US historical past to be impeached by Congress was Secretary of Struggle William W. Belknap in 1867. Belknap was unanimously impeached by the Home of Representatives for “prison neglect of his responsibility as Secretary of Struggle and basely prostitutes his excessive workplace out of his need for private acquire. .” The Senate acquitted Belknap, who had resigned simply earlier than the vote within the Home of Representatives.
The fees in opposition to Mayorkas are much less about corruption and extra about coverage variations, critics of the trouble say.
The primary article of the impeachment accuses Mayorkas of a “deliberate and systematic refusal to adjust to the regulation,” and the second article accuses him of a breach of the general public belief.
Democrats have stated the handful of impeachment hearings led by Home Homeland Safety Committee Chairman Mark Inexperienced failed to provide proof of “excessive crimes and misdemeanors” however as a substitute uncovered coverage variations.
However Republicans within the Home of Representatives have nonetheless pushed for a trial within the Senate.
“The American individuals demand a safe border, an finish to this disaster and accountability for these accountable,” Home Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wrote in a letter to Schumer final month. “Submitting articles of impeachment with out ever listening to a single argument or reviewing proof could be a violation of our constitutional order and an insult to the American individuals all of us serve.”
Senate Minority Chief Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., instructed native reporters final week that he expects Schumer to carry a vote to reject or desk the movement to question Mayorkas. Each choices would require solely a easy majority of senators.
With the slender majority that Democrats have within the Senate, it’s probably that the 2 articles of impeachment will go nowhere and that Mayorkas will stay in his function.
“My desire could be for an precise trial, however I believe the bulk would in all probability forestall that,” McConnell instructed reporters.
As impeachment managers transfer the articles of impeachment to the opposite chamber, Mayorkas may even be within the Senate on Wednesday to testify earlier than an appropriations panel about DHS funding for fiscal yr 2025.
The Republican impeachment managers of the Home of Representatives are Inexperienced of Tennessee, Michael McCaul of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ben Cline of Virginia, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Michael Visitor of Mississippi, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Laurel Lee from Florida. , August Pfluger from Texas and Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia.
Marketing campaign problem
Since Republicans flipped the Home of Representatives final yr, Republican lawmakers have continued to extend their opposition to the Biden administration’s immigration insurance policies.
The subject has additionally been central to the 2024 presidential campaigns, as Biden and former President Donald Trump made competing visits to the southern border in March.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee once more this yr, has campaigned on fears round immigration — as he did in his 2016 presidential marketing campaign, and the Biden administration is grappling with the very best variety of migrant encounters on the southern border in additional than twenty years. yr.
Republicans’ first main transfer final yr got here after the White Home ended a pandemic-era software often called Title 42, which was used to expel migrants. Republicans within the Home of Representatives handed HR 2 the identical day, a invoice stuffed with Trump-era immigration insurance policies.
And after a bipartisan deal within the Senate that resulted from months of negotiations, Republicans within the Home of Representatives rapidly sided with Trump, who urged them to reject the deal as he wished to marketing campaign on the problem.
Senate Republicans rapidly walked away from the deal to overtake U.S. immigration laws negotiated by Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.
Tensions in Congress solely elevated after the failure of that settlement. Home Republicans’ outrage over the White Home culminated in Mayorkas’ impeachment in late February.
On the eve of Biden’s State of the Union handle in early March, Republicans within the Home of Representatives handed a invoice named after a Georgia pupil, Laken Riley, whose homicide has been blamed by conservatives on the White Home’s immigration insurance policies.
GOP goal
Eradicating Mayorkas has been a Republican objective — particularly for Greene. She first launched articles of impeachment for Mayorkas final September, months earlier than an impeachment inquiry started.
Republicans held two public impeachment hearings in January. The primary consisted of Republican attorneys basic from three states – Montana, Oklahoma, Missouri – and a authorized scholar. These attorneys basic argued that their states had been harmed by the Biden administration’s immigration insurance policies.
The second listening to featured two moms who stated the Biden administration’s immigration insurance policies performed a job of their daughters’ deaths.
Mayorkas was not a witness at both listening to.
Inexperienced, who has led the impeachment effort, has argued that the committee compiled proof in a December report from the committee’s Republicans that discovered Mayorkas had failed “to implement legal guidelines handed by Congress drive’.
Mayorkas, the son of Jewish Cubans who fled the Nazis and got here to the U.S. as political refugees, is the primary immigrant and Latino confirmed to guide DHS.
He had a rocky affirmation course of in 2021, with a number of Senate Republicans elevating points concerning the Biden administration’s rollback of Trump-era immigration insurance policies.
When the Senate in the end confirmed Mayorkas, six Republicans joined Democrats in making the affirmation vote 56-43 bipartisan.
The six Senate Republicans who voted for his affirmation had been Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and then-Sen. Rob Portman from Ohio.
McKenna Horsley contributed to this report.
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