WASHINGTON (CN) — House Republicans' effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was dead in the water Tuesday evening as the lower chamber voted against a resolution aimed at removing the Biden administration official from his post.
The impeachment resolution against Mayorkas, championed by hardline conservatives who said the secretary had intentionally failed to secure the country's southern border, was knocked down in the House on a razor-thin 214-216 vote. Several Republican lawmakers, including California Representative Tom McClintock and Colorado Representative Ken Buck, broke ranks to vote against impeaching Mayorkas.
The measure's failure is a black mark against House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said Tuesday morning that he was optimistic about its chances in the lower chamber.
Republicans who opposed the impeachment said they didn't support the Homeland Security secretary's leadership but told their colleagues that Mayorkas's conduct did not constitute impeachment.
Writing in an op-ed published Monday in The Hill, Buck said that while he believes Mayorkas is “incompetent” and “will most likely be remembered as the worst secretary of Homeland Security” in U.S. history, those charges do not rise to an impeachable offense under the Constitution.
Despite uncertainty about the fate of their effort, Republican lawmakers stuck to their guns Tuesday as they advocated for Mayorkas’ impeachment on the House floor.
“The American people … have had enough of the secretary’s lies,” said Texas Representative Michael Burgess.
The Republican lawmaker accused Mayorkas of breaking his oath of office and showing “willful and systematic refusal to comply” with U.S. immigration law, particularly the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Rehashing the claims laid out in the impeachment resolution, Burgess said that the Homeland Security Department has ignored regulations mandating the detention of migrants trying to enter the country, a trend dubbed ‘catch-and-release’ by Republicans. The lawmaker also repeated accusations that Mayorkas overstepped his authority to grant parole to migrants awaiting determinations from U.S. immigration courts.
“Every day that Secretary Mayorkas remains at the head of the DHS is another day of pathetic disservice to the American people,” Burgess said.
Fellow Texas Representative Chip Roy, a staunch advocate of ousting Mayorkas, pushed back on criticism that Republicans’ effort misinterprets the Constitution.
Congress has the responsibility of determining the limits of the Constitution’s ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ threshold for impeachment, Roy said, adding that the standard “most certainly includes” administration officials who have ignored federal law.
Mayorkas, the Texas Republican claims, “has blatantly ignored the laws of the United States that he was charged to execute,” arguing he has done so with “reckless abandon.”
Meanwhile, House Democrats again framed the impeachment effort Tuesday as a hack job, contending that Republicans were more interested in scoring a political victory than pursuing meaningful border policy.
The articles of impeachment against Mayorkas “fail to identify an impeachable crime,” said Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, quoting a letter from California Republican McClintock in which the lawmaker says that his colleagues “stretch and distort the Constitution” to hold the Biden administration accountable for border security.
“They trivialize the process and make a total mockery of the institution,” McGovern said of his Republican colleagues. “They say this is about securing the border — their plan to secure the border is to impeach the guy responsible for securing the border.”
The Massachusetts Democrat pointed to blooming Republican opposition to a Senate border security bill as evidence of the GOP’s political gamesmanship.
“They’d rather let chaos prevail than work with Democrats to have a conversation about a path forward,” McGovern said, adding that Republican lawmakers are more concerned with keeping immigration in focus as former President Trump builds his latest bid for the White House around the issue.
It’s increasingly unlikely that the Senate bill, a bipartisan measure that would have allocated billions of dollars in federal spending towards border security programs, will even clear the upper chamber.
Senate Republicans, many of whom have harshly criticized the compromise legislation, are expected to mount a filibuster this week to block the measure from seeing a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise have both said that the lower chamber would refuse to consider the bill even if it somehow found its way out of the Senate.
McGovern argued Tuesday that the dissolution of the bipartisan border compromise shifts the onus for border security onto Republicans.
“That’s the real dereliction of duty here,” the lawmaker said of his GOP colleagues. “They own this now. They own the border.”
As lawmakers spar over the politics of border security, hundreds of migrants have died attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico in recent years. A September report from the United Nations found that 686 migrants died or disappeared on the southern border in 2022 — although the organization acknowledged that its figures were likely an undercount.
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