Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas may become the first Cabinet member to be impeached in 1876 after the House Homeland Security Committee voted early Wednesday morning to send two articles of impeachment against him to the full House.
The committee approved the articles by an 18-15 vote along party lines, citing a “deliberate and systematic refusal to comply with the law” and a “violation of the public trust” in the secretary's approach to the border crisis, CBS News reported.
The full House of Representatives is expected to consider this issue next week.
“We cannot allow this man to remain in office much longer,” committee Chairman Mark Green of Tennessee told CBS. “The time for accountability is now.”
Unsurprisingly, House Democrats have called the Republican-led effort to impeach Mayorkas “sham.”
“None of the impeachment charges that the committee will consider today are a high crime or a misdemeanor,” said Bennie Thompson, the ranking committee member from Mississippi.
“The impeachment scheme is a dangerous attempt to distort the Constitution,” he said, according to Axios.
Perhaps most surprisingly, one of the lawyers who defended former President Donald Trump during his impeachment hearings, Alan Dershowitz, agreed with him.
In an op-ed for The Hill published Tuesday titled “Republicans who voted against impeachment should not vote to impeach Mayorkas,” Dershowitz said that, just as Trump had not been charged with “treason, bribery, and other high crimes or misdemeanors, as the Constitution defines for impeachment, The current impeachment proceedings were based on “equally vague and unconstitutional reasons.”
“Whatever Mayorkas may or may not have done, he did not commit bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors,” he wrote, accusing some Republicans of being willing to apply a “double standard” because they dislike the Biden administration’s policies.
He also noted — as both CBS and Axios did in their reporting — that Mayorkas would not be convicted in the Democratic-controlled Senate and would therefore remain in his current position, regardless of how the House votes on the articles of impeachment.
The right-leaning editorial board at the Wall Street Journal was more direct in its opinion piece, “Firing Mayor Achieves Nothing.”
Republicans on the committee argued that a “misdemeanor” when the Constitution was written would have referred to an “act of insult to oneself,” CBS reported, which would essentially lower the impeachment bar to include anything a House member finds. unacceptable.
“If this becomes a new precedent, the floodgates will open and you will have petty impeachment from here until the end of time,” Rhode Island Rep. Seth Magaziner said during the hearing.
If the House impeaches Mayorkas, he will become the second Cabinet member to receive the dubious honor, and the first in 148 years.
Secretary of War William Belknap, a former Civil War general and member of President Ulysses S. Grant's cabinet from 1869 to 1876, when the House of Representatives voted to impeach him for what the United States Senate website described as “a pattern of corruption flagrant even by the standards of the United States.” Scandal tarnished Grant's administration.
Despite the fact that Belknap had already resigned from his cabinet position, a majority of senators voted to convict him. However, the number of votes to convict was far short of the two-thirds threshold required by the Constitution, so he was acquitted.
This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.
