In early February, congressional Republicans made a conspicuous choice. They decided to kill a bipartisan Senate deal that included tough border security measures. Instead, they pressed forward with what was essentially a messaging exercise: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.<\/p>\n
The confluence of events was telling. Even by the accounts of several Republicans, their party preferred attacking the Biden administration over the crisis at the border to actually doing something about it.<\/p>\n
Two months later, Mayorkas\u2019s impeachment is dead. The Senate dispatched with the trial quickly Wednesday afternoon shortly after finally receiving a pair of articles of impeachment against him from the House.<\/p>\n
It was predictable that the Democratic-controlled Senate would do this. But Republicans hope it will, at the very least, make Democrats look bad \u2014 as if they aren\u2019t interested in holding accountable a man who Republicans say is responsible for the chaotic border.<\/p>\n
And will it make the Democrats look bad?<\/p>\n
There is no question the border is a major liability for President Biden. Mayorkas isn\u2019t exactly a sympathetic character, either; a recent poll showed that independents dislike him by a 2-to-1 margin.<\/p>\n
But the GOP\u2019s impeachment effort was troubled from the start \u2014 in ways that sharply undercut the claim that Democrats are derelict in shrugging off an impeachment trial. Even many Republicans said Mayorkas\u2019s actions weren\u2019t impeachable, and the party wound up lacking complete unity in both chambers in historic ways.<\/p>\n
There was, of course, the remarkable initial vote in which the GOP-controlled House somehow failed to impeach Mayorkas. Three House Republicans voted against it, and a Democrat whom the GOP didn\u2019t expect to be present returned to leave the GOP one vote shy. The GOP ultimately succeeded a week later, by one vote.<\/p>\n
Fast-forward to Wednesday, and the GOP was again unable to keep its membership united. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) moved to vote on whether the articles against Mayorkas were unconstitutional \u2014 basically that they did not meet the Constitution\u2019s standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. On the first article, Mayorkas\u2019s alleged \u201cwillful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,\u201d Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) voted \u201cpresent.\u201d<\/p>\n
It appears to be the first time in modern history that a senator from the impeaching party didn\u2019t vote with the party against dismissing charges. Republican senators were united in opposing such a motion in the 1999 Bill Clinton impeachment \u2014 even as 10 later voted to acquit Clinton \u2014 and Democratic senators were also united in opposing a motion to dismiss Donald Trump\u2019s post-Jan. 6 impeachment charges three years ago.<\/p>\n
Similarly, it\u2019s the first time every senator from the president\u2019s party voted to dismiss the charges. A lone Democrat voted against dismissing Clinton\u2019s charges in 1999, and five Republicans voted against dismissing Trump\u2019s in 2021.<\/p>\n
The handful of GOP defections undersell just how much concern there was about what their party was doing. Several GOP senators who voted against dismissing the charges nonetheless had previously labeled the whole thing a waste of time. They said the House hadn\u2019t shown that Mayorkas actually did anything impeachable. They said Mayorkas was basically just carrying out the administration\u2019s policy.<\/p>\n
One called it \u201cthe worst, dumbest exercise and use of time.\u201d Another said the House GOP was \u201ctargeting a member of the administration without doing their homework.\u201d A third said the House had \u201cnothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those senators can perhaps justify their votes against dismissing the charges by saying the Senate should hold an actual trial if the House impeaches. But it\u2019s also evident that such a trial might well have resulted in a remarkable number of defections on the impeaching party\u2019s side \u2014 if the GOP senators stayed true to their past comments about Mayorkas.<\/p>\n
Of course, the intricacies of Congress \u2014 and whether an alleged offense is technically impeachable or just bad \u2014 are generally of little concern to the American people. So Republicans will point to this as evidence that Democrats aren\u2019t taking the border seriously and hope the American people care about it.<\/p>\n
What we can say right now is that it\u2019s not clear Americans care or can be made to care that much. That poll mentioned above, from the Economist and YouGov shortly after Mayorkas\u2019s impeachment, showed Americans approved of it 43 percent to 25 percent \u2014 a pretty large margin. And, as mentioned, the poll also showed Mayorkas was unpopular.<\/p>\n
But it also showed 4 in 10 Americans didn\u2019t even have an opinion of him \u2014 reflecting how few people were tuning in to the whole thing. And we don\u2019t have other good polling on this, in large part because it doesn\u2019t seem to have penetrated as a story.<\/p>\n
In short, it\u2019s now up to Republicans to get the American people animated about something that even their congressional membership wasn\u2019t terribly animated about.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In early February, congressional Republicans made a conspicuous choice. They decided to kill a bipartisan Senate deal that included tough border security measures. Instead, they pressed forward with what was essentially a messaging exercise: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The confluence of events was telling. Even by the accounts of several Republicans, their party […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3265,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}