House Republicans send Mayorkas impeachment articles to Senate

Republicans sent their articles of impeachment for Joe Biden’s director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, to the Senate on Tuesday, an end to a series of delays and political games as well as the beginning of the end for the impeachment itself.

Members of the House including Marjorie Taylor Greene who were selected as impeachment managers for the DHS chief’s upcoming Senate trial assembled in a small procession and delivered the articles to the Senate.

The impeachment effort will not result in a conviction in the Senate; Democrats have rejected the effort as a political stunt and noted that Republicans did not lay out specific “high crimes” of which Mr Mayorkas is supposedly guilty — the standard for impeachment.

Instead, the impeachment effort hinges on two articles: one accusing Mr Mayoraks of wilfully disregarding the law by supposedly not enforcing US immigration law, and a second accusing him of abusing the public trust. The impeachment crusade failed to pick up a single Democratic vote in the House; it is expected to do even worse in the Senate, where some Republicans may end up voting against it.

Mr Mayorkas would only be removed from office with the vote of two-thirds of the Senate. Democrats currently control the chamber by a slim margin.

The DHS chief’s impeachment is thought by some Democrats to be a smokescreen to cover up the GOP’s failure to unify around an impeachment of President Joe Biden. That effort is now wholly stalled, with Republicans showing no signs of picking up enough votes for articles of impeachment to pass the House of Representatives and the president this week declining to testify to the committee handling the matter.

Republicans continue to insist that what they’ve uncovered proves the existence of links between the president and his son’s overseas business efforts, but as of yet the GOP has yet to produce a single document or witness to directly corroborate that claim. Several witnesses called by the committee have directly refuted it.

Border security remains a top issue in Washington even if the impeachment of Mr Mayorkas is doomed to fail in the Senate. Reports have indicated that the president and some of his allies in Congress are warming to the idea of executive action to address illegal crossings at the border, which numbered more than 130,000 in March.

In the Senate, a bipartisan working group produced a framework for legislation to address border security that would have given Mr Biden authority to temporarily freeze the US asylum program, but the deal fell apart after House Republicans (led by calls from Donald Trump) declared it “dead on arrival” in the House.