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More than a month after House Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, despite the GOP’s inability to find any evidence of him committing high crimes, the articles were finally delivered to the Senate on Tuesday. Republicans in the upper chamber responded by demanding a full impeachment trial.
They didn’t get one. As NBC News reported, the Senate Democratic majority dismissed both of the articles against the DHS chief just hours after the proceedings began.
The speed of the impeachment trial was an embarrassing blow to Republicans who had threatened to gum up the Senate and delay the proceedings in a bid to highlight what they argue is Mayorkas’ failure to secure the border and stop the flow of thousands of undocumented migrants at the border. However, Democrats, who control the upper chamber, easily dispensed with the pair of impeachment articles — as well as several motions to adjourn the Senate.
There were a series of procedural votes, but ultimately it came to a relatively straightforward question: Did senators consider the impeachment articles against Mayorkas to be constitutionally legitimate? In votes that the GOP minority could not filibuster, it took 51 votes to reject the articles and end the process.
Yesterday, both articles received 51 votes, with the entirety of the Senate Democratic conference united.
The case against the Homeland Security secretary, in other words, has run its course, ending in predictable fashion.
But before the political world moves on, it’s worth considering just how weak the Republicans' talking points were. To hear GOP senators tell it, (a) the Democrats’ rejection of the case against Mayorkas reflects a lack of seriousness about border policy; and (b) Democrats have set a dangerous new precedent by refusing to hold an impeachment trial in response to the House-passed articles.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not. He was,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “And by doing what we just did, we have in effect ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial. No evidence, no procedure — this is a day that’s not a proud day in the history of the Senate.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri added, “So this will be the precedent going forward. Impeachment as a constitutional matter is effectively dead now. They just they just killed it.”
So, a few things.
First, at no point in recent months have GOP lawmakers in either chamber treated this process with even a hint of seriousness. The entire impeachment ordeal was a cheap stunt, and Senate Republicans all but admitted that they wanted a trial as part of an election-season public-relations gambit.
Second, if GOP officials want to talk about which party is serious about border policy, perhaps they can explain why they were so quick to kill the bipartisan border plan they requested.
Third, many of the Senate Republicans who insisted that the institution was required to conduct a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles are the same Senate Republicans who tried to forgo a full impeachment trial in response to House-backed articles three years ago after Donald Trump’s second impeachment.
As for the idea that Senate Democrats have set a dangerous precedent by dismissing impeachment articles without a trial, the GOP appears to have this backwards. The impeachment crusade against Mayorkas was itself a radical and unprecedented scheme. Republicans sought evidence of high crimes, failed to find any, and decided to nevertheless impeach a sitting cabinet secretary — without cause — for the first time in American history.
As regular readers know, the Republicans’ impeachment hearings against the DHS secretary were a joke; and the impeachment effort was condemned by constitutional experts from the left, right and center, senators from both parties, some prominent voices in conservative media, and former Homeland Security secretaries from both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The real risk would’ve been to legitimize the GOP’s abuse, setting a far more dangerous precedent.
Yes, the Senate’s rejection of the articles was unprecedented, but it was a first-of-its-kind response to a first-of-its-kind abuse.