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How do we know this? Well, the framers of the Constitution considered a lower standard at the constitutional convention in 1787. When Virginia delegate George Mason suggested that impeachable offenses be restricted to “treason, bribery or maladministration,” James Madison pushed back. “So vague a term will be equivalent to tenure during the pleasure of the Senate,” he argued.
House Republicans have produced no conservative impeachment scholars to defend their actions. Their go-to legal expert, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has said he sees no impeachable offense here. “Absent some new evidence, I cannot see the limiting principle that would allow the House to impeach Mayorkas without potentially making any policy disagreement with a cabinet member a high crime and misdemeanor,” Turley wrote in the Daily Beast. “That is a slippery slope that we would be wise to avoid.”
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In the draft impeachment articles released on Sunday, Mayorkas is accused of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” The evidence for the first amounts to a grab bag of complaints about the Biden administration’s immigration policies, including that it failed to comply with mandates to detain migrants and that it expanded “parole” programs for migrants from various countries.
No matter that, as George W. Bush homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal, under Mayorkas, “the majority of migrants encountered at the Southwest border have been removed, returned or expelled.”
No matter that no administration, Democrat or Republican, can possibly comply with the technical requirement to detain every individual who crosses the border illegally; Congress has never provided the funding for that. As Homeland Security pointed out in a memo, “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS secretary since the Department was founded.”
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No matter that prior administrations, including Donald Trump’s, have used “parole” to admit citizens from various countries.
The evidence for the second charge — breach of public trust — is even thinner: that Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security … principally to obfuscate the results of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” Obstructed lawful oversight? Mayorkas has testified before Congress 27 times in 35 months, more than any other Biden Cabinet official.
None of this is to suggest there isn’t a problem at the border. There is, the result of years of congressional failure to tackle the difficult trade-offs presented by the immigration debate, including how to deal with those already in the country. One tragedy of the Mayorkas impeachment charade is that it distracts from the latest effort to craft an immigration deal that both sides might actually support. Impeachment is a diversion, not a solution; Mayorkas won’t be removed from office — the Senate is unlikely to convict Mayorkas if it gets that far — but even if he were, nothing would change in the administration’s approach to immigration.
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To take one example of the consequence of congressional inaction, the articles of impeachment complain that the immigration court backlog has more than doubled during Mayorkas’s tenure, “destroying the courts’ ability to administer justices and provide appropriate relief in a timeframe that does not run into years or even decades.” If House Republicans truly cared about dealing with the judicial logjam, instead of scoring political points, they would be taking seriously a Senate proposal to increase the number of immigration judges and asylum officers. And for the record: The backlog of immigration cases more than doubled during the Trump administration.
Which brings me to a final, more personal tragedy: the toll these proceedings take on someone who has spent the bulk of his career serving his country. I happen to know Mayorkas, a Cuban-born immigrant whose mother escaped the Holocaust and whose family fled Cuba after the Castro revolution. He is as decent, thoughtful and committed a public servant as I have encountered. But don’t take it from me. Listen to his Republican predecessor, Chertoff, who described Mayorkas as “fair and honest — dedicated to the safety and security” of the United States.
If House Republicans get their way, if the impeachment power is so corrupted, who will be willing to subject themselves to this sort of abuse? It is one thing to know as an intellectual matter that impeachment is unwarranted and conviction will not be forthcoming. But to become a footnote in the history books, a second entry after the corrupt Belknap, is an injury that no one who has worked so hard for his country should be forced to endure.
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The articles of impeachment filed against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas make a mockery of the solemn congressional power to remove officials for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” To understand how out of line — indeed, how dangerous — these proceedings are, it helps to return to William Belknap, the only Cabinet secretary ever impeached.
Belknap, the secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant, was accused in 1876 of selling the lucrative right to operate a military trading post in the Oklahoma Territory. Belknap resigned but the House impeached him anyway, charging him with “basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain.” (In the end, the Senate failed to muster the necessary two-thirds vote for conviction.)
Belknap committed the essence of an impeachable offense, as the Republican members of the House Homeland Security Committee heard in testimony they have chosen to ignore.
“The foundational requirement for impeachable ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is that they must be of extraordinary seriousness and ought to be of a type that corrupts or subverts governmental processes or the constitutional order,” one of the nation’s leading experts on impeachment, University of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman, told the panel as it hurtled toward writing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. “Following the policy directives of one’s elected superior in pursuit of that superior’s policy aims is simply not an impeachable abuse of power.”
How do we know this? Well, the framers of the Constitution considered a lower standard at the constitutional convention in 1787. When Virginia delegate George Mason suggested that impeachable offenses be restricted to “treason, bribery or maladministration,” James Madison pushed back. “So vague a term will be equivalent to tenure during the pleasure of the Senate,” he argued.
House Republicans have produced no conservative impeachment scholars to defend their actions. Their go-to legal expert, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has said he sees no impeachable offense here. “Absent some new evidence, I cannot see the limiting principle that would allow the House to impeach Mayorkas without potentially making any policy disagreement with a cabinet member a high crime and misdemeanor,” Turley wrote in the Daily Beast. “That is a slippery slope that we would be wise to avoid.”
In the draft impeachment articles released on Sunday, Mayorkas is accused of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” The evidence for the first amounts to a grab bag of complaints about the Biden administration’s immigration policies, including that it failed to comply with mandates to detain migrants and that it expanded “parole” programs for migrants from various countries.
No matter that, as George W. Bush homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal, under Mayorkas, “the majority of migrants encountered at the Southwest border have been removed, returned or expelled.”
No matter that no administration, Democrat or Republican, can possibly comply with the technical requirement to detain every individual who crosses the border illegally; Congress has never provided the funding for that. As Homeland Security pointed out in a memo, “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS secretary since the Department was founded.”
No matter that prior administrations, including Donald Trump’s, have used “parole” to admit citizens from various countries.
The evidence for the second charge — breach of public trust — is even thinner: that Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security … principally to obfuscate the results of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” Obstructed lawful oversight? Mayorkas has testified before Congress 27 times in 35 months, more than any other Biden Cabinet official.
None of this is to suggest there isn’t a problem at the border. There is, the result of years of congressional failure to tackle the difficult trade-offs presented by the immigration debate, including how to deal with those already in the country. One tragedy of the Mayorkas impeachment charade is that it distracts from the latest effort to craft an immigration deal that both sides might actually support. Impeachment is a diversion, not a solution; Mayorkas won’t be removed from office — the Senate is unlikely to convict Mayorkas if it gets that far — but even if he were, nothing would change in the administration’s approach to immigration.
To take one example of the consequence of congressional inaction, the articles of impeachment complain that the immigration court backlog has more than doubled during Mayorkas’s tenure, “destroying the courts’ ability to administer justices and provide appropriate relief in a timeframe that does not run into years or even decades.” If House Republicans truly cared about dealing with the judicial logjam, instead of scoring political points, they would be taking seriously a Senate proposal to increase the number of immigration judges and asylum officers. And for the record: The backlog of immigration cases more than doubled during the Trump administration.
Which brings me to a final, more personal tragedy: the toll these proceedings take on someone who has spent the bulk of his career serving his country. I happen to know Mayorkas, a Cuban-born immigrant whose mother escaped the Holocaust and whose family fled Cuba after the Castro revolution. He is as decent, thoughtful and committed a public servant as I have encountered. But don’t take it from me. Listen to his Republican predecessor, Chertoff, who described Mayorkas as “fair and honest — dedicated to the safety and security” of the United States.
If House Republicans get their way, if the impeachment power is so corrupted, who will be willing to subject themselves to this sort of abuse? It is one thing to know as an intellectual matter that impeachment is unwarranted and conviction will not be forthcoming. But to become a footnote in the history books, a second entry after the corrupt Belknap, is an injury that no one who has worked so hard for his country should be forced to endure.
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