Despite GOP leaders’ support, House punts on Mayorkas impeachment

The House hasn’t yet held any impeachment hearings related to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. No one has formally presented credible evidence of the cabinet secretary having committed any high crimes. The idea that lawmakers would proceed with an impeachment vote anyway — making Mayorkas the first cabinet secretary in 147 years to face such a rebuke — is difficult to take seriously.

And yet, the House held just such a vote roughly 12 hours ago, and it nearly worked. Roll Call reported:

The vote tally might seem counterintuitive: Because this was a vote on whether to table the impeachment resolution, those voting “nay” were the members who supported impeachment.

If the entirety of the GOP conference voted in lockstep, it would’ve been enough to impeach Mayorkas, but these eight Republican members voted with the Democratic minority:

1. Cliff Bentz of Oregon
2. Ken Buck of Colorado
3. John Duarte of California
4. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina
5. Darrell Issa of California
6. Tom McClintock of California
7. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina
8. Michael of Turner of Ohio

Eleven Republican members, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, did not vote. The rest wanted to proceed with impeaching the Homeland Security secretary — who, it’s worth pausing to appreciate, doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong.

For now, this means the matter will return to the congressional backburner. Mayorkas is not yet in the clear — Rep. Mark Green, the Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has spent much of the year moving in the direction of impeaching the cabinet secretary — but the public shouldn’t expect another vote on this for a while.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who forced this vote with a privileged resolution, will simply have to wait — while pursuing impeachment crusades against several other members of the Biden administration.

But as the dust settles on this misguided skirmish, let’s not brush past the fact that the House Republican conference currently has 221 members, roughly 91% of whom were prepared to go along with this partisan stunt.

Indeed, it stands to reason that fringe figures such as Greene would support such a move, but House GOP leaders — Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, and Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer — voted with their far-right colleagues.

They knew the party was circumventing the process. They knew there’d been no hearings. They knew no one had presented evidence of wrongdoing. They didn’t care.

The line between Republican leaders and Republican radicals continues to blur to the point of invisibility.