Table Of Content
- House delivers Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate to begin a trial
- GOP lays groundwork for impeaching DHS chief Mayorkas
- Joe Biden wins Democratic primary in Puerto Rico
- Get Weather App
- Get News App
- House Republicans release impeachment articles against Mayorkas amid push to remove him over the border
For House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), Wednesday’s events in the Senate cemented the belief that the best way to end his probe into the president was with criminal referrals to the Justice Department, not an impeachment vote. While voting down the Mayorkas impeachment ended the legislative effort to make him the face of the border crisis, House conservatives have no shortage of names of Biden officials they’ve floated for a possible impeachment. Conservatives came into the current Congress vowing to hold Biden administration officials — and the president himself — accountable. At the same time, Romney said he wants to at least express his view that "Mayorkas has done a terrible job, but he's following the direction of the president and has not met the constitutional test of a high crime or misdemeanor."
House delivers Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate to begin a trial
Democrats say they are necessary crowd control maneuvers to alleviate pressure on Customs and Border Patrol processing centers. The truth invariably gets in the way of this bogus impeachment, but thankfully Republicans must still meet a high bar. But, of course, migrants, drugs and weapons have been illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border over the course of several presidential administrations.
House Republicans are ready to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas. Vote will be close - Florida Politics
House Republicans are ready to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas. Vote will be close.
Posted: Tue, 06 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
GOP lays groundwork for impeaching DHS chief Mayorkas
Democrats have lambasted the impeachment proceedings, calling them a waste of time when lawmakers should be working together to solve the problems. They also say Republicans are part of the problems at the border, with Republicans attacking Mayorkas even as they have failed to give his department the tools it needs to manage the situation. Even as the House is taking steps to try remove him from office, Mayorkas has been engaged in arduous negotiations with senators seeking to reach a bipartisan deal on border policy.
Joe Biden wins Democratic primary in Puerto Rico
Senate Republicans outraged at Democrats’ quick move to kill the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas without a trial warn that the precedent set could give rise to a nightmare scenario for Democrats in the future. Republicans say the quick dismissal of charges against Alejandro Mayorkas sets a dangerous precedent. The proceedings began at 1pm, when Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, administered the oath of office to the Senate president pro tempore Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington.
Get Weather App
They cited cities such as New York that have struggled with high numbers of migrants, taxing housing and education systems, as proof of the financial costs immigration is taking. Mayorkas, who has called House GOP’s allegations “baseless,” is unlikely to be removed from office. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote by the Senate, and Democrats control the chamber 51-49. House Republicans formally delivered articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday. The hearing last week is one of several planned by Republicans along with photo-ops of legislators at the border.
Efforts underway to save iconic Santa Monica diner
The majority leader then called for votes to dismiss the trial, setting off a series of procedural maneuvers by Republicans to delay the proceedings, all of which were rejected by the Democratic majority. Hours before the articles were delivered to the Senate, Mayorkas was on Capitol Hill, pressing Congress to provide his agency with more resources to enforce border policies and to pass legislation updating the nation’s outdated immigration laws. Schumer has said the Senate would convene on Wednesday as a “court of impeachment” and senators will be sworn in as jurors. Patty Murray, the Senate president pro tempore, a Democrat of Washington, presided over the chamber as the House homeland security chair, Mark Green of Tennessee, read the charges aloud.
Get News App
The 11 House impeachment managers, the prosecutors appointed by Johnson, are a mix of senior Republicans and conservative hard-liners. Never before has a sitting Cabinet secretary been impeached, and it was nearly 150 years ago that the House voted to impeach President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, over a kickback scheme in government contracts. But critics of the impeachment effort said the charges against Mayorkas amount to a policy dispute over Biden’s border strategy, hardly rising to the Constitution’s bar of high crimes and misdemeanors.
House Republicans impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas by single vote - WSWS
House Republicans impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas by single vote.
Posted: Wed, 14 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
If Mayorkas were to be impeached, the charges would next go to trial in the Senate, where it takes a super-majority to convict. Accelerating the action in the new year comes as the focus on border security is driving the discussion on the campaign trail. Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has vowed to launch the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history if he returns to the White House. Green, a Tennessee Republican, opened the second impeachment hearing saying “no American is safe” under Mayorkas’ handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, with a record number of illegal crossings. He argued that the secretary’s “egregious misconduct and failure to fulfill his oath of office” are grounds for impeachment.
News
They have argued that Mayorkas is doing the best he can to manage border security but with a system that hasn’t been updated in decades and is chronically underfunded. They cite growing numbers of migrants who have at times overwhelmed the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to care and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s past two budget years.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. House voted Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, with the Republican majority determined to punish the Biden administration over its handling of the U.S-Mexico border after failing last week in a politically embarrassing setback. The second article accuses the secretary of breaching the public trust by misrepresenting the state of the border to lawmakers and hampering the Republican-led investigation into his conduct. Even if the GOP-controlled House impeaches Mayorkas, it's highly unlikely that he would be convicted in a trial in the Senate, which has a Democratic majority and would require a vote of two-thirds of senators to remove him from office. Republicans are demanding a full trial of the homeland security secretary, but Democrats have made it clear they will try to dismiss the charges quickly and with little fanfare. Republicans say Mayorkas has eliminated policies that discouraged border crossings and implemented others, such as expanding humanitarian parole, that encourage migrants to come to the United States.
Majority Democrats have said the Republicans' case against Mayorkas doesn't rise to the "high crimes and misdemeanors" laid out as a bar for impeachment in the Constitution, and Schumer likely has enough votes to end the trial immediately if he decides to do so. Fallon said that he introduced impeachment articles to help get “the ball rolling,” but still believes it’s key to show the American public why they believe Mayorkas deserves to be removed from his post. Fallon’s resolution says Mayorkas has “undermined the operational control of our southern border and encouraged illegal immigration,” also contending he lied to Congress that the border was secure. It’s unclear if Republicans, with only a very narrow majority in the House, will push ahead with impeachment if they don’t have enough support from their ranks.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican representing Utah, said last week he wasn't sure what he would do if there were a move to dismiss the trial. "I think it's virtually certain that there will not be the conviction of someone when the constitutional test has not been met," he said. Senators will be sworn in Wednesday as jurors, turning the chamber into the court of impeachment.
One top chairman is already sounding supportive of the move, a sign of how the idea of impeaching President Joe Biden’s Cabinet secretary has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the conference. Impeaching a Cabinet secretary has happened only once before in the nation’s history, when the House impeached Defense Secretary William Belknap in 1876 over kickbacks in government contracts. The leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson, emerged cautiously optimistic, as Senate leaders eye a potential vote on that package next week.
The two sides have also disputed whether Mr. Mayorkas was given adequate opportunity to testify in the panel's impeachment proceedings, which lasted less than a month. The panel never subpoenaed Mr. Mayorkas for his testimony and rescinded an invitation to have him testify in person when the two sides ran into a scheduling dispute. “For the last nearly four years, we’ve seen Secretary Mayorkas willfully cede operational control of our border to drug cartels,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday, describing the chaos at the country’s southern border as he urged the Senate to take up the case.
While most Republicans oppose quick dismissal, some have hinted they could vote with Democrats. South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, has said the Senate needs to hold a full trial at which it can examine the evidence against Mayorkas and come to a conclusion. The White House also applauded the conclusion of what it called a "baseless impeachment." But he also had left open the possibility that the bills could ultimately be packaged together, and Republican leaders could still take procedural steps to send all those pieces as one package to the Senate, which could enrage the right wing of the House GOP conference.
Three House committees — Oversight, Homeland Security and Judiciary — will soon hold hearings about the influx of migrants and security concerns at the border. “The open border is the number one issue across America in poll after poll and that is exactly why this committee impeached you,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman, one of 11 House Republicans tapped to serve as an impeachment manager. "Impeachment should never be used to settle a policy disagreement; that would set a horrible precedent for the Congress," Schumer said in a floor speech Monday. "Nevertheless, the Senate's plan has not changed since last week. We are ready to go whenever the House sends us the articles. We want to address this issue as expeditiously as possible." It kicks off what’s expected to be a very short trial in the upper chamber — one that could wrap up by week’s end.
No comments:
Post a Comment