Category: Immigration

Yes, the House GOP really will try to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The House is scheduled to vote Tuesday afternoon on impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, but the outcome isn’t at all assured. It’s a numbers game for Republican leadership, with two party members publicly opposing impeachment and a handful undecided. The very slim majority of Republicans means that leadership can likely lose only three of their members and pass the impeachment resolution.

The latest Republican “no” vote comes from Rep. Tom McClintock of California, who announced his opposition Tuesday morning. “Do Republicans really wish to establish an expansive view of impeachment that will surely be turned against conservatives on the Supreme Court or a future Republican president if Congress changes hands?” McClintock wrote in his statement. He joined Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who was the first Republican to publicly say he’d vote against impeachment. 

In addition to McClintock and Buck, Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin voiced his reservations in a conference meeting Tuesday morning, saying that this would lower the standard for impeachment. And there are at least three Republicans who have publicly declared they are undecided: Reps. David Joyce of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the former speaker pro tempore. 

The Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green of Tennessee apparently didn’t make a compelling case for the principles of impeaching Mayorkas during that Tuesday morning meeting, instead attacking Mayorkas personally, calling him, “a reptile with no balls” because he refused to resign. That’s hardly a principled argument for high crimes and misdemeanors.

This impeachment is purely political and entirely baseless, and most Republicans know it. Also this: 

The Republican Party, in a nutshell: On Monday, they're going to kill the harshest immigration deal in decades because their nominee wants to run on the issue. On Tuesday, they're going to launch an impeachment inquiry on the DHS Secretary for not being harsher on immigration.

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) February 5, 2024

That helps Democrats make the case against it, pointing out that impeachment is no solution to what Republicans like to call the border crisis, and that it’s purely a political distraction. Here’s a statement from President Joe Biden’s administration:

Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas would be an unprecedented and unconstitutional act of political retribution that would do nothing to solve the challenges our Nation faces in securing the border. [...]

The impeachment power was never intended as a device for members of an opposing political party to harass Executive Branch officials over policy disputes. [...]

Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas would trivialize this solemn constitutional power and invite more partisan abuse of this authority in the future.

It’s as likely as not that all but three Republicans fall into line with their MAGA counterparts and move ahead with this baseless impeachment—one that’s sure to be buried by the Senate. This is yet another test of principle for Republicans, and one that the majority will gleefully fail.

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Congressman shreds Trump’s worst ‘ideas’ for border security

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

The House Homeland Security Committee convened on Tuesday to discuss and vote on two Republican-led articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Democratic members of the committee decided to take a two-pronged approach to managing today’s proceedings.

First, they pointed out how overtly political this impeachment process has been, and second, Democrats stressed how Republicans spend most of their time and energy complaining about border security while fighting tooth and nail to stop anything from actually being done about border security. That obstructionism includes trying to impeach Mayorkas.

Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California used his time to detail how “Donald Trump and House Republicans also have their own ideas for the border” and went on to helpfully list these actual proposed solutions. 

So let's review the majority’s border ideas, that they've actually presented. Here they are:

Donald Trump actually has said that he wants to build alligator moats along the border. That's one of his incredible ideas. 

Another idea that Donald Trump has promoted is he actually wants to electrify the border fence, and maybe even put some spikes on the border. That's another Donald Trump and MAGA-majority border idea. 

Another idea, which I'm not sure how well it would go, is he wants to actually bomb northern Mexico with missiles. That's another Trump idea.

And finally, I think one of the ones that I think is the most grotesque, is suggestions that instead we should maybe just shoot migrants in the legs as they cross the border. So once again, the Donald Trump and MAGA plan is alligator moats, bombing northern Mexico, shooting migrants in the legs, and electrifying the fence, and putting spikes on them. That is the Donald Trump border plan. 

And so again, we are here today with these horrific ideas being presented constantly by the former president. This is all about trying to get Donald Trump reelected. Donald Trump himself is saying he wants no solutions this year out of the Congress. And Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden continue to offer solutions every day and are ready to actually talk about real immigration and border solutions in this country.

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The Republican Party has admitted too many times that these committee hearings and impeachment pushes are entirely political maneuvers, fueled by petty revenge and attempted power grabs. These partisan performances have nothing to do with the checks and balances in our Constitution.

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It is primary season, and Donald Trump seems pretty low energy these days. Kerry and Markos talk about the chances of Trump stumbling through the election season and the need to press our advantage and make gains in the House and Senate. Meanwhile, the right-wing media world is losing its collective minds about Taylor Swift registering younger Americans to vote!

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Watch: Republicans slammed for ‘debasing and demeaning’ the Constitution

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Committee met to discuss the Republican-created articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The entire enterprise against Mayorkas has been an example of one of the most transparent weaponizations of impeachment provisions in our lifetime. 

Rep. Daniel Goldman decided to use his time to give a masterclass on how hypocritical, political, and ultimately dangerous this endeavor is, describing the proceedings as “completely debasing and demeaning the impeachment clause of the United States Constitution, and it is a gross, gross injustice to the credibility of this institution.” Goldman reminded the committee that impeachment has only been used against people who have abused their power and should not be used as a way to attack what you might believe to be “bad” policy. “That is for elections and that is for legislation,” Goldman continued.

He then drilled into the political nature of these proceedings, and how they are an attempt to give Donald Trump and congressional Republicans something to run on during this election cycle: “You are sitting here right now trying to impeach a secretary of Homeland Security for neglecting his duties literally while he is trying to perform his duties and negotiate legislation.” Finally, Goldman detailed the catch-22 of nongovernance being performed by the GOP, and how corrosive it is to our country.

So your own party is sabotaging and undermining this administration's efforts to address the border while you are trying to impeach him by saying that they're not addressing the border. The hypocrisy is the least of it. Your attack on the rule of law and our democracy is the worst of it. And you better be careful about the bed that you make. I yield back.

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Mayorkas has been a publicly convenient symbol for Republican attacks on immigration policy. No matter how jaw-droppingly obvious the fallacy of their attacks may seem, it is all that they’ve got. Since the GOP continues to fail to gin up enthusiastic electoral support from its voters by way of culture wars attacking trans children and banning books on race and history, trying to impeach Mayorkas has become their substitute for doing anything substantial about our country’s immigration policies.

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Republicans admit impeaching Mayorkas is all politics

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The House Homeland Security committee will vote Tuesday on two impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. House Republicans have been trying to dress up this impeachment—originated by very serious lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—as valid, arguing that Mayorkas “has willfully and systemically refused to comply with Federal immigration laws” and pretending it rises to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” threshold for impeachment. At the same time, Republican members are spilling the beans to right-wing media: This is all about the politics.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas admitted it on Fox News. Asked what the point of the exercise is when the Senate is sure not to act on it, he said it’s to ”send a message to the administration.” Watch:

.@RepMcCaul says on Fox News that House Republicans want to impeach Mayorkas to "send a message to the administration." No high crimes. Not even a misdemeanor! Just naked politics -- and they aren't even trying to hide it. pic.twitter.com/rEy2kshU6G

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 29, 2024

Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York told Newsmax the same thing. “This is sending a message to the Biden administration,” Tenney said. “This guy needs to go, and don’t put another person in place to do what Alejandro Mayorkas did.” 

Republicans have been admitting this for weeks now, actually. Here’s Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas: “The impeachment process is necessary to send a message to the administration to say [Mayorkas is] not doing his job, and we’re feeling it … And if this is the way that we have to do it, this is the way it has to be done.”

Even Republicans admit this isn’t real and isn’t going anywhere. It’s about politics, and the Biden administration is rising to that challenge. It slapped back in a memo from the Department of Homeland Security, calling the impeachment “just more of the same political games” from Republicans.

“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it. That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” the memo adds.

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House GOP wages war with itself, the Senate, and reality

Posted on by Joan McCarter

The government-funding can that Congress kicked down the road earlier this month is inexorably rolling toward the new deadlines in early March, and so far, none of the 12 appropriations bills that have to be completed have made it through both the House and the Senate. But that doesn’t seem to be a priority this week, because the House Republican majority is once more at war with itself, the Senate, and reality. The agenda for this week includes fighting over the border policy bill the Senate is preparing, fighting over a tax bill that should be a no-brainer for every member of Congress, and impeaching a cabinet secretary over nothing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is working hard to appease both Donald Trump and the MAGA crowd in the House on the border legislation that a bipartisan group in the Senate has been working on. That’s the immigration policy changes Republicans insisted be included in a national-security supplemental funding package with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Now that a deal on immigration—which Republicans have been claiming to be the most important policy issue of the day—is within reach, the House is rejecting it. They would rather have the issue to run on in this election than to actually do something to solve it.

That’s putting Johnson at loggerheads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is pushing hard for some sort of deal in order to salvage assistance to Ukraine—a top priority for the Kentucky senator. Last week, Johnson said the deal is “dead on arrival,” without even seeing legislative language. And the fight has spilled over into the Senate, where hard-line MAGA members—like Ohio’s J.D. Vance, who is opposed to Ukraine aid—are lining up against McConnell.

“If you’re going to take a tough vote, you take one but you want to accomplish something. The worst of all possible worlds is you take a vote, you put a lot of political pressure on the House and you don’t get any policy accomplished,” Vance told Politico. The Senate could vote on the legislation as soon as this week.

Back in the House, there’s what should be a no-brainer tax bill on tap. But it’s got both the hard-liners and the moderates up in arms. The bill would extend the child tax credit to help more working families and reduce some business taxes. What more could you want in an election-year tax bill? Republicans are turning on each other along familiar breaklines: MAGA vs. everyone else.

The Freedom Caucus is pushing a lie that the tax credits would go to “illegal foreign nationals.” Of course, that’s not true, and even Americans for Tax Reform, a right-wing lobbying group, is saying so. They point out that anyone receiving the tax credit has to have a Social Security number, and that “There are no ‘anchor baby bonuses’ in this bill as one organization alleged.” 

Meanwhile, the so-called “moderates” in the GOP conference—largely a group of New York Republicans representing swing districts—are hopping mad that their No. 1 issue isn’t included in the bill. That’s raising the SALT cap, the limit on federal deductions for state and local taxes. “There is real anger about the process,” one GOP lawmaker in the SALT Caucus told The Hill.

House moderates might unite on the other big issue in the House Homeland Security Committee: impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over nothing. Back in November, eight of them originally voted to defuse a motion from Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to impeach Mayorkas by instead sending it to committee. The group argued that if it was going to happen, it needed to happen through the committee process. Now that it has, they’ll probably be on board, never mind that there is absolutely no foundation for the action, and that the Senate will not vote to convict Mayorkas. It seems like this bunch of moderates figure they’ll have better luck getting reelected in their Biden districts on taxes than on bucking MAGA leadership.

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Tim Miller from “The Next Level” podcast comes on to discuss Iowa, New Hampshire, and the cracks they expose in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

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McConnell considers killing major immigration deal to help Trump

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Republicans have the biggest policy win on immigration in decades within their grasp, but Donald Trump is calling the shots now, so the deal is all but dead. In what’s been reported as a Senate Republican meeting Wednesday, leader Mitch McConnell told his colleagues he doesn’t “want to do anything to undermine” Trump.

This is the same McConnell who reportedly privately celebrated the fact that “Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us” by impeaching Trump for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. The McConnell who, after voting not to convict Trump on said impeachment charges, publicly declared Trump "practically and morally responsible" for the attack on the Capitol that day in his floor speech announcing that he would not vote to impeach Trump. Trump “seemed determined to either overturn the voters' decision or else torch our institutions on the way out,” McConnell said at the time.

"A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name," McConnell added. "These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags and screaming their loyalty to him."

But now McConnell’s apparently declaring his loyalty to Trump, as well, while the Republican civil war fomented by Trump spills over from the House to the Senate. On Wednesday, McConnell reportedly told Republicans they are in a “quandary” over Trump’s opposition to the proposed bill, which would give Republicans big concessions on border policy. He even used Trump’s own words, to show that a big victory is in reach.

“He did a good job of quoting Donald Trump saying in 2018 that we will never get a Democrat to vote for this [border] stuff,” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told CNN. But that wasn’t enough for MAGA politicians, who “want to kill it and run on the issue,” as one Senate Republican source told The Hill. Another GOP senator said after the meeting, “I think the border portion is dead.”

Senate MAGA members held a press conference Wednesday to attack the possible deal and to  declare war on McConnell for even considering cooperating on the bill. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas basically called McConnell a traitor to Republicans. “Chuck Schumer’s enemies in Congress are conservatives in the Senate and are House Republican leadership,” Cruz said. “And sadly, Mitch McConnell’s enemies are conservatives in the Senate and House Republican leadership.” And Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said, “The problem is our leader. … Leader McConnell is really the stage manager of this negotiation.”

McConnell isn’t publicly crying uncle, not yet, telling one reporter Thursday that talks are still ongoing, but the writing is definitely on the wall. Trump doesn’t want a border deal, and McConnell doesn’t seem likely to try to defy him, not when it could endanger his own leadership position.

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New letter exposes Republicans’ latest absurdity in their impeachment stunt

Posted on by Walter Einenkel

The Republican-led House Homeland Security Committee kicked off the new year by wasting everybody’s time with new impeachment hearings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. And on Wednesday, Chair Mark Green sent a letter to Mayorkas asking that the secretary provide written testimony since he “declined to appear” before the committee.

But that’s not exactly true. Also on Wednesday, NBC News obtained a letter from DHS contradicting Green’s assertion that Mayorkas “declined” anything. According to NBC, after the Republican-led committee originally requested that Mayorkas testify in person on Jan. 18, DHS replied that the secretary could not testify on that date due to scheduling conflicts. Specifically, Mayorkas would be hosting a delegation from Mexico to discuss immigration issues. In other words, the exact issue Republicans are pretending to be interested in working on as lawmakers.

In the letter, DHS explained that Mayorkas remained willing to testify in front of the committee at another date, but as DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg described it in a statement following Green’s letter, Republicans’ “rush to impeach” Mayorkas seems to be taking precedence over having a reason to impeach him.

This is just the latest example of Committee Republicans’ sham process. It’s abundantly clear that they are not interested in hearing from Secretary Mayorkas since it doesn’t fit into their bad-faith, predetermined and unconstitutional rush to impeach him. Last week, the Secretary offered to testify publicly before the Committee; in the time since, the Committee failed to respond to DHS to find a mutually agreeable date.

Instead, they provided this offer of written testimony to the media before any outreach to the Department. [Homeland Security Committee] Republicans have yet again demonstrated their preference for playing politics rather than work together to address the serious issues at the border.

Mayorkas has long been a target for the do-nothing Republicans in Congress because immigration has been an amorphous boogeyman they use to (successfully) frighten their base. Sometimes, though, Republican lawmakers can’t keep their conspiracy theories straight, such as when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene mistakenly claimed during another hearing that the FBI was part of the Department of Homeland Security.

As a DHS official told NBC, Mayorkas has testified 27 times in 35 months—more than any other Biden Cabinet official—and has answered hundreds of questions concerning immigration and the southern border. The first two-hour hearing that Green chaired last week was unable to bring up a single piece of evidence that might rise to the level of impeachment.

Green’s choice to try and paint Mayorkas as dodging these circus-like impeachment proceedings is possibly twofold: It allows Republicans a chance to throw suspicion on Mayorkas’ as guilty of something while also ensuring that the secretary won’t publicly embarrass them the way he recently humiliated Sen. John Hawley.

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Senate inches closer to border deal. Will House GOP and Trump kill it?

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Senate negotiators made some progress in talks over the holiday break on a potential border and immigration deal, which was the Senate Republicans’ requirement for agreeing to a vote on President Joe Biden’s Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan supplemental funding package. Over the weekend, the lead Republican in the talks, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, said text could be released soon. The fate of that agreement, however, lies in the hands of his fellow Republicans and their fealty to their de facto leader, Donald Trump.

“Text hopefully this week, to be able to get that out,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “This agreement has to work. Everyone’s counting on this actually working.” Senate leaders were cautiously positive on Monday. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor statement that “it’s been a very promising few days. We have made more progress in the past couple of days on the border than we have in the past few weeks.”

“I was encouraged to see that Senator Lankford and our Democratic colleagues made progress toward an agreement to put meaningful border security policy at the heart of this supplemental,” said Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. “Russia is openly mocking the fickleness of Western support for Ukraine,” he intoned with a shocking lack of irony, since it’s entirely congressional Republicans’ fault that U.S. support to Ukraine is endangered. "The Senate cannot afford to get this wrong," McConnell declared.

As Monday wore on, Lankford tempered his optimism and his revised deadline for delivering text to next week, with a Republican conference on the negotiations hastily scheduled for Wednesday to brief skeptical conservatives, showing the cracks that could make Senate Republicans get this very wrong.

Ukraine aid needs at least 10 Republican senators to support it, and they are skeptical at best right now, both on Ukraine and on the immigration deal Lankford is trying to secure. Last month, Republican senators voted unanimously to keep Ukraine aid from moving to a floor vote over the border issue, and now there is a contingent of Republicans who seem intent on torpedoing Lankford’s efforts.

One of them is McConnell’s previous number two, Sen. John Cornyn, who is taking a hard line in the talks on the president’s authority to provide immigration parole to people who have financial sponsors coming from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. These immigrants are not crossing at the southern border; they fly into the country. Cornyn and others want to severely restrict, if not end, Biden’s humanitarian parole authority. “We can’t fix asylum and then just have them release people on parole,” Cornyn told The Washington Post. “That would be a disaster politically, and otherwise.”

Other Republican senators like MAGA star J.D. Vance of Ohio are egging the House extremists on in their threats to shut the government down over immigration. “I think that we have a real fiscal crisis in our country, but I think the most significant crisis we have is what is going on at the southern border,” Vance told the Post. “And I encourage my Republican friends in the House to use all the negotiating leverage they can to solve this problem politically.” Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas will reportedly try to force a “no confidence” vote on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in support of the House’s impeachment effort, which won’t advance in the Democratic Senate.

It seems like the most fervent Republican backer of Ukraine, McConnell, is following rather than leading his fellow Republicans at this point, going along with the demands from his hardliners on immigration. That’s a problem for the future of Ukraine, particularly with House Speaker Mike Johnson taking hard line on talks, insisting that the extreme House immigration bill passed last year is a “necessary ingredient” for the deal. He also moved forward with Mayorkas’ impeachment, despite the lack of cause.

When it comes to immigration, Johnson is catering to the Freedom Caucus. That group hasn’t backed off last week’s government shutdown threats over immigration, and are now even more adamant after Johnson’s agreement for a government funding deal with Schumer.

Hanging over all of this is Trump: Republican lawmakers’ fealty to him; his increasingly bombastic, Hitleresque immigration rhetoric; and his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He would likely end all support to Ukraine and hand the country over to Russia if he got back into office.

The specter of Trump hangs over Congress and over Ukraine. There need to be enough Republicans willing to buck Trump for the bleak outlook for Ukraine aid—and thus Ukraine’s future—to improve.

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