Republican Senators Urge McConnell to Ensure Mayorkas Impeachment Trial

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during a press conference announcing
Nathan Howard/AP
Neil Munro

Thirteen Republican senators are urging GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to force a formal impeachment trial of President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Mayorkas was impeached on February 13 for refusing to enforce the nation’s border laws. But Democrats — and some pro-establishment GOP senators — are hinting they will ignore the House’s impeachment and will not conduct Mayorkas’ trial in the Senate.

The senators’ letter to McConnell said:

We call on you to join our efforts to jettison this approach by Democrats to shirk their constant duty, ensure that the Senate conducts a proper trial and that every Senator, Republican and Democrat, adjudicates this matter when the Senate returns.

A Senate decision to ignore the House’s impeachment “is an action rarely contemplated and never taken by the U.S. Senate in the history of our Republic,” the GOP letter said, adding:

It remains to be seen if the Senate rules will even allow us to brush aside our duty in this manner, but one thing is sure, if a similar strategy was contemplated by Senate Republicans while we were in the majority with a Republican occupying the White House, the opposition would be fierce and the volume from Democrats would be deafening.

The 13 GOP Senators include Mike Lee (R-UT), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Ted Budd (R-NC), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate’s Majority Leader, has dismissed the impeachment. “House Republicans failed to present evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense … This is a new low for House Republicans.”

The House inpeached Mayorkas for refusing to enforce Congress’s law that requires the detention of migrants at the nation’s border until their asylum claims are completed.

Pro-migration advocates – including Mayorkas — describe their alternative “catch and release” policy as just “prosecutorial discretion.”

However, the policy encourages illegal migration by showing would-be migrants that they can get the American jobs they need to pay smuggling debts. Poor migrants can now safely mortgage their homes and farms to get a job in the United States.

The policy also gives the business alliance of smugglers, drug cartels, and labor traffickers a quasi-legal conveyor belt for getting clients into the United States and getting their clients’ wages back to foreign bank accounts.

This unspoken cooperation between the smuggling business and the White House successfully extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The imported workers, consumers, and renters push up Wall Street’s stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

Under Biden and Mayorkas, the colonialism-like policy has imported at least 6.2 million migrants. It has killed many Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.

The lethal and destructive cooperation, however, has long been supported by a large bloc of D.C. officials and legislators who have gradually and quietly dismantled the nation’s border defenses. Mayorkas, for example, has repeatedly asked Congress to fund fewer detention beds.

Similarly, McConnell’s border bill would have legalized a catch-and-release highway for all migrants who simply promised to file for asylum. The secretly negotiated bill was discarded once the GOP caucus learned how it would open the nation’s borders.

McConnell may be trying to avoid a Mayorkas trial, according to a CNN report from February 15:

McConnell said he hadn’t taken a position yet on the Mayorkas trial and whether he would vote to dismiss the charges.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” McConnell said, noting that Democrats would move to quickly kill the proceedings. “So I don’t think we’ll have two endless trials like we’ve had recently.”

Lee and Cruz are trying to get the Senate’s Parliamentarian to state rules for holding — or not holding — a trial.

Axios.com reported on February 20:

Lee and Cruz met quietly with the Senate parliamentarian a week ago, arguing that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) should not be able to simply set aside the historic impeachment articles so early in the process, Lee told Axios.

The parliamentarian, whose job is to interpret Senate rules and precedent, has not yet provided them any kind of formal response.

Lee told Axios he doesn’t know where GOP leadership will end up, but he hopes they aren’t “complicit in the Democrats’ effort to just table the motion as if this were some childish, sophomoric exercise.”

Mayorkas is also trying to ignore his impeachment by the House — which is only the second impeachment of a presidential cabinet member. The New Yorker reported on February 17:

That morning, Mayorkas had awoken to an otherwise typical day. There’d been a “morning huddle” at headquarters, in Washington, followed by a session in a secure location, where he received the President’s Daily Brief. Later that day, he was in a boardroom in Mountain View, California, meeting with a Silicon Valley executive about artificial intelligence. A staffer summoned him for a phone call. “O.K., thanks,” the Secretary said flatly, upon hearing the news of the vote. His face betrayed no emotion. He handed the phone back and, closing the door to the boardroom, resumed the meeting.

Yet Mayorkas – who is a pro-migration zealot — also boasted to the New Yorker that he has minimized enforcement of Congress’s laws that require the deportation of illegal migrants: “You don’t hear about ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] picking up grandmothers … Even during Obama, that was a huge issue. We have changed the landscape.”

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