Eight House Republicans helped Democrats thwart an attempt led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to begin impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Greene submitted the resolution for Mayorkas’ impeachment last week, proposing a vote without the customary hearing or committee markup. If this resolution had passed, it would have expedited the impeachment process, sending the case directly to the Senate for a trial.
The eight Republicans who sided with the Democrats are Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), John Duarte, (R-Calif.), Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), Cliff Bentz (R-Ore.), and Mike Turner (R-Ohio). The final vote was 209-201 against impeachment. Twenty-four members, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, didn’t vote.
Mayorkas has been a target for impeachment over his mishandling of the southern border. After inheriting a secure southern border, the Biden administration instituted open-border policies, creating a humanitarian and security crisis. Within months of Biden taking office, there were reports of overflowing migrant facilities and immigrant children being kept in deplorable conditions and reportedly sexually assaulted. This crisis has also seen a huge influx of fentanyl crossing the border and an unknown number of migrant children being sex trafficked. In addition to the border crisis, Mayorkas punished Border Patrol agents over whippings he knew never actually happened. He has been accused of lying under oath to Congress.
Then-Speaker McCarthy was calling on Mayorkas to resign or be impeached a year ago.
“Our country may never recover from Secretary Mayorkas’ dereliction of duty. This is why today I am calling on the secretary to resign,” McCarthy said at the time. “If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action, and every failure. And we will determine whether we can begin an impeachment inquiry.”
Mayorkas has repeatedly denied there’s a crisis at the border. On his watch, migrant encounters at the southern border reached an unprecedented peak in September, with a staggering 260,000 encounters.
Mayorkas has refused to resign despite multiple calls to do so. It’s been very clear that it is entirely up to the Republican Party to hold him accountable. The failure of the Republican Party to be united in the goal of holding Mayorkas accountable for the border crisis is mind boggling.
Naturally, the Department of Homeland Security’s reaction to the vote was to call it a waste of time and a “baseless attack [that] is completely without merit and a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities."
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