When former Rep. Ken Buck announced last month that he was resigning from Congress, the Colorado Republican made little effort to hide his disgust with the state of the institution. In fact, he pointed to one specific abuse — executed by his own party — that he found especially indefensible.
“We’ve taken impeachment, and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck declared. “This place keeps going downhill.”
He was referring, of course, to House Republicans’ decision two months ago to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — the first-ever impeachment of a sitting cabinet secretary — despite the inconvenient fact that the GOP couldn’t find any evidence of high crimes committed by the DHS chief.
Critics of the move accused Republican lawmakers of treating Congress’ impeachment power like a partisan toy, which the party was a little too eager to throw around as an election-season plaything.
GOP officials keep proving their critics right. NBC News reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson will delay sending articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate until next week, his spokesman said, as Senate Republicans consider ways to inflict political pain on Democrats, including a threat to bring the upper chamber to a halt.
House GOP leaders could’ve sent the matter to the Senate in February, and if Republicans genuinely believed this was an urgent concern, they likely would’ve done just that. Instead, they waited two months and planned to advance the process today.
But those plans were delayed — not for substantive reasons, but because the party is still trying to figure out how to have the most fun with their toy. As a Washington Post report summarized:
Republican senators are widely skeptical that impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas meets the standard of high crimes and misdemeanors. But it’s an election year, after all, and Republicans have decided to rally around the border as an issue, using the impeachment trial as another cudgel against Democrats when voters are increasingly prioritizing border security as a top political issue.
Under the original schedule, the Senate was going to receive the articles of impeachment against Mayorkas today, and Democratic members were set to vote tomorrow to either dismiss or table the articles. With 51 votes, the narrow Democratic majority was in a position to dismiss the matter swiftly — and since senators of both parties have a strong preference to leave Capitol Hill on Thursday afternoons, ahead of their three-day weekend, Republicans were unlikely to even try to drag the process out. With this in mind, a group of far-right senators reached out to House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday, imploring the Louisiana Republican to push the matter to next week in order to give the party the best possible public-relations opportunities. Or as the Post’s report added, “[M]any Republicans want to draw out the impeachment process as long as possible and make it as painful as possible for Democrats facing re-election in red and purple states.” The question isn’t whether the Senate will remove Mayorkas from office. It won’t. That would require 67 votes, which is an impossibility given that (a) every member of the Democratic majority, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, considers this charade ridiculous; and (b) several Republican senators have also conceded that this entire exercise is meritless. The question, rather, is whether GOP senators succeed in creating a pointless election-year spectacle, turning a serious constitutional power into a public-relations gambit.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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