When Congress Failed to Pass Articles of Impeachment for Alejandro Mayorkas, a Failover for Biden’s Legacy

Republicans in Congress failed to pass articles of impeachment for Alejandro Mayorkas, which was seen as a way to deliver on a promise to the GOP base voters.

The vote was stuck in a tie for several minutes as leaders scrambled, but in the end, four Republicans voted against the measure and the final vote was 214 to 216.

They may get another chance if Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who was absent while undergoing cancer treatment, is able to return. If Tom Suozzi wins next week’s special election in New York and is sworn in immediately, his vote could be canceled. But a better move is for Republican leaders to tell their loudest members that they’ve been embarrassed enough, and to drop the whole thing.

The Republican base and conservative media figures called for impeachment of multiple Biden administration officials, including the Attorney General and President Biden himself, after the party took over the house in the mid-terms.

Republicans have focused on investigations and oversight to deliver on demands from their base in a divided Congress where a Democratic-controlled Senate can quash any partisan bills sent from the House. The Republican conference was unable to unify and retain a majority on the Mayorkas impeachment measure.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that the house did not take the move lightly. Mayorkas was accused of failing to enforce federal law.

The one of the Republicans who voted against impeachment spoke on the House floor Tuesday. Mayorkas is a guilty man in regards to our immigration laws. We know that it isn’t grounds for impeachment because the American founding fathers specifically rejected it.

“They did not want political disputes to become impeachments because they would shatter their separation of powers that vests enforcement of the laws with the president, no matter how bad his job is,” said Brienttock.

The vote to impeach Speaker mike Johnson will be referred to as an embarrassment for him, as he is unable to rally his troops or count them, but it’s really an embarrassment for 215 republican members who voted to impeach him because they disagreed with their boss.

(Yes, on paper it looks like four Republicans voted against impeachment, but one of them, Blake Moore of Utah, switched his vote at the last minute just so he could bring up a motion allowing Republicans to try the vote again down the road.)

Three Republicans in the House, Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California, seem to have the only understanding of how the Constitution is supposed to work. McClintock, for example, despises Mayorkas and accuses him of “maladministration, malfeasance and neglect of duties on a truly historic scale” for letting too many immigrants into the country.

He said last year that these are not impeachable offenses. The founders, he said, set a high bar for impeachment — treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors — and if Republicans make a crime out of a disagreement, they “will have signed off on this new and unconstitutional abuse of power.”

The fact that most of his party is still angry about the impeachments of Donald Trump shows how uneducated they are. They were desperate for a way to equalize the playing field against any Democrat.