Table Of Content
- The impeachment trial against Alejandro Mayorkas barely got underway. Here's a recap of what happened
- Biden and Netanyahu speak as pressure’s on Israel …
- Court strikes down controversial California law abolishing single-family zoning
- House Republicans send Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate, forcing trial
At the time, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who had been hospitalized for emergency abdominal surgery, made a surprise arrival, wheeled into the chamber in scrubs and socks to vote against it — leaving the vote tied and leading to its failure. The evening roll call proved tight, with Speaker Mike Johnson’s threadbare GOP majority unable to handle many defectors or absences in the face of staunch Democratic opposition to impeaching Mayorkas, the first Cabinet secretary charged in nearly 150 years. While immigration enforcement has been strained in recent months by large numbers of migrants crossing illegally, the Biden administration has responded by returning or removing more migrants than any prior administration, according to DHS. "The results of his lawless behavior have been disastrous for our country," he said, in part. "Empowered and enriched cartels, mass fentanyl poisonings, surges of terror watchlist suspects, more criminal illegal aliens causing harm in our communities, and traumatized and exploited migrants will be Secretary Mayorkas' open-borders legacy." Administration officials also point to a number of legal experts, some brought forward by the House Homeland Security Committee, who say the constitutional grounds for impeachment have not been met.
The impeachment trial against Alejandro Mayorkas barely got underway. Here's a recap of what happened
Republican holdout Gallagher, who had served as a Marine, announced over the weekend he would not be seeking reelection in the fall, joining a growing list of serious-minded Republican lawmakers heading for the exits. Johnson and the Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the Biden administration could take executive actions, as Trump did, to stop the number of crossings — though the courts have questioned and turned back some of those efforts. Several leading conservative scholars along with former Homeland Security secretaries from both Republican and Democratic administrations have dismissed the Mayorkas impeachment as unwarranted or a waste of time. Border security has shot to the top of campaign issues, with Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, insisting he will launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” if he retakes the White House. Democrats say Republicans are trying to impeach Mayorkas over policy disputes, which legal experts have said are not grounds for impeachment. The first impeachment article goes on to accuse Mayorkas of having circumvented the law by paroling migrants into the U.S. "en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention."
Biden and Netanyahu speak as pressure’s on Israel …
Asked about the factual inconsistency, a spokesman for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who sits on the Homeland Security committee, told CNN reporter Daniel Dale in colorful language that, essentially, facts are irrelevant in this case. “I’d say impeachment could be done for a good while when you set the precedent of not having a trial for the first time ever. It’s been devalued by what Schumer did, and I think you can expect that kind of thing to happen if they’d ever initiate it on the other end,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said. Some conservative senators see impeachment being closed off as an option for the rest of the year for a different reason. They argue that Schumer’s call to dismiss the articles before a trial could even take place will likely scare off any other attempts this year. Schumer said the charges against Mayorkas did not compare to those against Trump and were engineered to help the former president as he runs again this year.
US House Fails to Impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas - Voice of America - VOA News
US House Fails to Impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.
Posted: Tue, 06 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Court strikes down controversial California law abolishing single-family zoning
At a news conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans demand the Senate hold a full impeachment trial for Alejandro Mayorkas. Some Republicans have said they would like time to debate whether Mayorkas should be impeached, even though debate time is usually not included in impeachment proceedings. Negotiations were underway between the two parties over whether Schumer may allow that time and give senators in both parties a chance to discuss the impeachment before it is dismissed. At a press conference with a group of Republican senators after the articles were delivered, the impeachment managers demanded that Schumer move forward with their case. Majority Democrats have said the GOP case against Mayorkas doesn’t rise to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” laid out as a bar for impeachment in the Constitution, and Schumer probably has enough votes to end the trial immediately if he decides to do so.
The Biden administration ended the practice in 2021, one of many moves Republicans cite as having contributed to a surge of migration that followed. Republicans say this charge stems from a five-part investigation they conducted into Mr. Mayorkas's border policies before they started impeachment proceedings. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that they have provided tens of thousands of pages of documents to the panel, in compliance with the requests. The focus on the guidelines Mr. Mayorkas issued in 2021 — particularly as it applies to migrants with a criminal record — has been a major rallying cry for Republicans as they charge Mr. Mayorkas with willfully undermining laws and endangering the United States.
Democrats control the Senate, 51-49, and they appear to be united against the impeachment effort. The House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution, is prepared to move ahead with formal proceedings if there appears to be a consensus within the GOP conference, according to a GOP source directly familiar with the matter. The first impeachment resolution introduced by House Republicans already has picked up support, including from a member of the GOP leadership team.
House Republicans send Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate, forcing trial
But Republicans pushed ahead, arguing that Mayorkas’s handling of the southern border warranted a historic rebuke. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., filed articles of impeachment against him in August 2021 but the measure went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Congress. Americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the border, now a top concern for many voters. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans have assailed Biden over the border while Donald Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has again put immigration at the center of his campaign. Still, constitutional scholars argue that the allegations against Mayorkas do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses.
Support our journalism
Under the Constitution, the basis for impeachment is "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." And although enough House Republicans supported the impeachment effort in the lower chamber, the effort is all but certain to die in the Senate. The second impeachment article accuses Mayorkas of "knowingly making false statements to Congress and the American people and avoiding lawful oversight in order to obscure the devastating consequences of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law and carry out his statutory duties." But even after the GOP push to delay the articles' transmission, the duration of the trial in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where the effort is widely seen as a political stunt, has not been determined.
House Speaker Mike Johnson defended his approach to the supplemental foreign aid funding in an interview with CNN on Wednesday after the bill text showed a strong similarity to the bipartisan Senate measure. This goes to the heart of the discretionary authority that successive administrations have employed to prioritize which migrants should be first in line for removal. Mr. Mayorkas's 2021 guidelines laid out a strategy similar to those of previous administrations, which prioritized using limited resources to deport the most dangerous migrants before those with lesser or older offenses on their records. The delay in deporting people often comes down to resources, including not only a lack of available detention space, but also putting migrants on flights to their home countries.
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 department said in a statement Sunday. The Senate would hold a trial, and a two-thirds vote is required for conviction, an exceedingly unlikely outcome in the Democratic-run Senate. Next up was Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a possible Republican contender for the U.S. He attested to a massive increase in fentanyl seizures since 2018, and in traffic stops for human smuggling and trafficking, though he noted most drivers are predominantly American. The U.S.-Mexico border is a complex region not easily reduced to sound bites that sometimes turn out to be just myths — or convenient lies. “I think it’s a complete dereliction of duty not to run that full trial process,” he said, borrowing a term that the House once mulled as a charge for Mayorkas.
"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." He accused Mr. Mayorkas and President Biden of intentionally failing in their responsibilities to secure the border. “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS Secretary since the Department was founded,” the agency said in the statement.
The second article alleged he lied to lawmakers about whether the southern border was secure when he previously testified that his department had "operational control" of the border, and accused Mayorkas of obstructing congressional oversight of his department. After two months of delay, House Republicans on Tuesday delivered articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to the Senate, as they demanded a full trial of the first sitting cabinet secretary to be impeached by Congress. In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring detention of migrants, and that through his policies, a crisis has arisen at the border. They accuse him of releasing migrants without effective ways to make sure they show up for court or are removed from the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo written by Mayorkas that sets priorities for whom the agency should target for enforcement proceedings as proof that he is letting people stay in the country who don’t have the right to do so. The historic nature of the trial — the first time in nearly 150 years that a Cabinet secretary was impeached — contrasted with the almost routine feel of the proceedings after senators have sat through two previous impeachment trials against former President Donald Trump in 2020 and 2021.
No comments:
Post a Comment