If the House follows through on this week’s [committee recommendation](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/mayorkas-impeachment-house.html#:~:text=The%20House%20Homeland%20Security%20Committee%20approved%20two%20articles%20of%20impeachment,of%20President%20Biden%27s%20immigration%20policies.) and impeaches Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, it will be the first time in American history that a sitting cabinet officer has been impeached. But Mr. Mayorkas is not as lonely as all that. Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against his boss, President Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, while threatening them against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Indeed, threats of impeachment have become a favorite pastime for Republicans following the lead of former President Donald J. Trump, who has [pressed his allies for payback](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/republicans-trump-biden-impeachment.html?timespastHighlight=trump,presses,for,impeachment,of,biden) for his own two impeachments while in office. The chances of Mr. Mayorkas, much less Mr. Biden, ever being convicted in the Senate, absent some shocking revelation, seem to be just about zero, and the others appear in no serious danger even of being formally accused by the House. But impeachment, once seen as perhaps the most serious check on corruption and abuse of power developed by the founders, now looks in danger of becoming a constitutional dead letter, just another weapon in today’s bitter, tit-for-tat partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals made clear that a president could feel assured of keeping his office no matter how serious his transgressions, as long as his party stuck with him, and the impeachment-in-search-of-a-high-crime efforts of the Biden era have been written off as just more politics. “Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious mechanism of executive branch accountability,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is of a piece with the decline of norms across Washington institutions and the ever-rising weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.” The current impeachment drives in the House have been nettlesome to the Biden team and certainly to Mr. Mayorkas, who issued a defiant seven-page letter before the House Homeland Security Committee voted for articles of impeachment against him along party lines this week. But where impeachment consumed the White House under Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump, it is barely an afterthought in the Biden West Wing. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F01%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fimpeachments-weapon-partisan-warfare.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F01%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fimpeachments-weapon-partisan-warfare.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F01%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fimpeachments-weapon-partisan-warfare.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F01%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fimpeachments-weapon-partisan-warfare.html).

Just when you thought House Republicans couldn’t warp the impeachment process any more, here we are, watching them twist and stretch this weighty constitutional provision beyond all recognition — like some grimy wad of Silly Putty pulled from under Marjorie Taylor Greene’s sofa. Opening a half-baked, highly partisan investigation into President Biden was a cheap stunt. But I’d argue that as House Republicans move forward with a floor vote to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, they are poised to drag the chamber down an even more tortured — and potentially damaging — path. Yes, the Biden impeachment folly is built on a steaming pile of [unsubstantiated](https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/politics/fact-check-house-impeachment-hearing-biden/index.html) charges and fever dreams sprung from the House’s conspiracy caucus. But, while desperate and dishonest, at least the effort claims [offenses](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/us/politics/biden-impeachment-case.html) that, if true, would qualify as impeachable. It would indeed be a major scandal if a vice president abused his office — taking bribes, even — to enrich himself and his family. House Republicans have yet to produce evidence that Mr. Biden did anything of the sort. But if ever they do, it will be wild times for sure! In targeting Mr. Mayorkas, Republican lawmakers aren’t really even bothering to pretend there are “high crimes and misdemeanors” at issue. The [essence of their case](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/us/politics/impeach-mayorkas-house-republicans.html) is that the secretary has done a lousy job dealing with the influx of migrants across the southern border. They [charge](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/30/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-explained/) that he has repeatedly violated immigration-related laws, fueling the surge, and abused the public trust by lying to Congress about how insecure the border actually is. Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock Pretty much everyone recognizes that this is not really about Mr. Mayorkas — who, as a cabinet official, is responsible for carrying out the policy preferences of the president. Those policies, obviously, are what House Republicans are riled up about. By putting the secretary through an impeachment inquiry, Donald Trump’s congressional team is putting Mr. Biden’s border record on trial in the midst of a high-stakes presidential contest. It is a tawdry political ploy dressed up as a high-minded policy dispute. But — and I cannot stress this enough — even the highest-minded policy dispute is not grounds for impeachment. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F05%2Fopinion%2Fhouse-impeachment-mayorkas.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F05%2Fopinion%2Fhouse-impeachment-mayorkas.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F05%2Fopinion%2Fhouse-impeachment-mayorkas.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F02%2F05%2Fopinion%2Fhouse-impeachment-mayorkas.html).

 Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., speaks during a news conference about impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last winter. Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images Impeachment is a crusty old word from a distant century. It is uncommon in present day English usage. But impeachment still connotes a constitutional process with potentially historic consequences. Over the past half-century, at roughly 20-year intervals, efforts to impeach three U.S. presidents have imprinted impeachment as a term and a process on the collective consciousness of the nation. One of those three presidents, Richard Nixon, resigned on the verge of impeachment in 1974. The others, Bill Clinton (1998-99) and Donald Trump (2019-20 and 2021) were impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate, which failed to muster the two-thirds majority required to convict. Nonetheless, the playing out of the drama surrounding Clinton and Trump has kept the idea of impeachment branding-iron hot. Even the word itself can be potent — a word that immediately becomes a weapon. When "impeachment talk" gets started, it becomes the focus for political conversation and an object of obsessive fascination for the news media. Even in this season of war and turmoil on many fronts, impeachment talk is guaranteed airtime and clicks. And so [it has been this winter](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227856012/mayorkas-impeachment-articles) as the House has moved toward an impeachment vote on Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mayorkas has responsibility for enforcing immigration policy, which is [fast becoming the hottest issue](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1226883552/bipartisan-border-deal-at-risk-of-collapse-under-pressure-from-trump) in both the presidential and congressional races this fall. It's helpful to understand how we got here. It is widely acknowledged that "encounters" between border crossers and border authorities have increased dramatically in the past three years — with federal authorities tallying more than 6 million migrants just at ports of entry since Biden took office. The easing of deportation rules, the fading of the COVID-19 pandemic, the encouragement of certain asylum-seekers and the desire to differentiate the Biden regime from that of his predecessor Trump have all contributed to the increase. Yet the numbers have reached a level that has alarmed even the White House. [Republican governors have transferred](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/31/1227157119/for-chicagos-new-migrants-informal-support-groups-help-ease-the-pain-and-trauma) tens of thousands of new arrivals to New York, Chicago and Denver. Some have also taken matters into their own hands, defying the right of the federal government to determine and enforce border policy. In response, Biden has been urging his own party to make sacrifices to get a bipartisan reform of immigration rules moving in the Senate. Some Republicans have seen an opportunity in this to achieve the policy tradeoffs they have long sought. Others have seen a political opportunity in resisting the negotiations and assigning blame for a worsening situation to Biden and his party. It must be said that the subtext for all this is the influence of former President Trump. No one who has watched Trump's career can be surprised that he deeply resents his own impeachment — not once but twice — by a Democratic majority in the House. Although he was acquitted both times by the Senate, Trump has reportedly taken his own impeachment episodes personally and shown great interest in evening the score. Trump has also been reported urging Republicans not to take part in negotiations toward a bipartisan compromise on immigration. He is said to see the issue as an albatross for Biden and as an opportunity to revisit and restore his own border policies — such as a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico — if he returns to office.  President Donald Trump holds a copy of _The Washington Post_ as he speaks in the East Room of the White House one day after the Senate acquitted on two articles of impeachment in 2020. Drew Angerer/Getty Images So it may have been inevitable that Biden's sharpest critics in the Congress began talking about impeaching him not long after the GOP assumed the majority of House seats in 2023. That talk has progressed to a preliminary inquiry that has focused primarily on Biden's son, Hunter, and allegations of improper influence. But those proceedings have yet to produce in public evidence of wrongdoing that would seem to amount to ["high crimes or misdemeanors"](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1198910270/impeaching-mayorkas-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-or-politics-as-usual) — the standard the Constitution mentions as grounds for impeachment. Lacking a clear shot at Biden, so far, House Republicans may see in Mayorkas a target of convenience. [A marathon hearing on his impeachment](https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227856012/mayorkas-impeachment-articles) this past week featured far more speech-making about immigration than about the Cabinet official himself. The committee eventually voted after midnight to forward the charges against Mayorkas to the full House. ### Who else has been impeached? Only one Cabinet official has actually been impeached in all of U.S. history. His name was William Belknap, and he was secretary of war in 1876 (long before that office was renamed the secretary of defense). Belknap was accused of receiving kickbacks from people he appointed to run trading posts at military forts around the country. While he rushed to resign before suffering the ignominy of a House vote, the House proceeded to impeach him anyway. The Senate ruled that it, too, had jurisdiction in the matter despite the resignation. But then it failed to muster the two-thirds vote to convict.  G. Thomas Porteous Jr., U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana, walks out of the hearing room during a break in his U.S. Senate impeachment trial in 2010. He had been impeached by the House and faced a Senate impeachment trial with charges involving payoffs, kickbacks and lying under oath. Mark Wilson/Getty Images Two other Cabinet members, an attorney general and a secretary of the Treasury were the subject of hearings in the House Judiciary Committee in the years between the two world wars. The former did not have articles of impeachment reported to the House floor, the latter resigned to become an ambassador and thereby brought the proceedings against him to a close. There have also been three attempts to remove all or part of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the panel that sets monetary policy. None of these efforts — in 1917, 1933 and 1985 — reached the House floor. The power to impeach has been at least a concept in English law since the 14th century, used at times against officials seen as stand-ins for the crowned monarch of the day. The existence of such a power spurred debate at the 1787 convention in Philadelphia that created the Constitution. Some attendees openly advocated a powerful, central chief executive, perhaps envisioning a consensus figure such as George Washington in the role. But others, such as Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania, feared the idea of an untrammeled chief executive. He thought it smacked of the imperial personage the American revolutionists had fought to overthrow, and he feared the lack of such a mechanism would leave opponents of the government without any form of nonviolent recourse.  Alcee Hastings testifying at his impeachment trial in 1989. Michael Jenkins/CQ-Roll Call Inc via Getty Images As it turns out, those who feared impeachment efforts would be a constant distraction did not see their fears borne out. Since the end of the 1700s, formal impeachment of a federal official in the U.S. has happened just 20 times. As noted, three of those were presidents and one was a Cabinet member. The rest were federal judges. Of these jurists, just eight were actually convicted and removed. Perhaps the best known was Salmon Chase, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, who was impeached in 1804 on charges of "arbitrary and oppressive conduct" as presiding judge on trials. Tried in the Senate, Chase was acquitted. The [most recent federal judge impeached](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/12/08/131904475/senate-convicts-louisiana-judge-on-impeachment-charge) was G. Thomas Porteous Jr., a District Court judge in Louisiana who was charged with accepting bribes and making false statements. The Senate found him guilty in 2010 and disqualified him from any future office. A few years before that, a district court judge in Florida named Alcee Hastings was impeached by the House in 1988 for bribery and perjury. He was convicted and removed by the Senate. But Hastings did not go quietly. He came back to win election to a seat in the House in 1992 and served in Congress for nearly three decades until his death in 2021.

House [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans) on Tuesday failed to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a spectacular defeat of an effort that Democrats denounced as a purely partisan exercise meant to boost the electoral prospects of Donald Trump. In a vote of 216-214, four Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against the two articles of impeachment against the secretary. The historic vote would have marked the first time since 1876 that the House has impeached a cabinet official, but with hours to go before a scheduled evening vote its prospects were unclear. But Democrats have retorted that Republicans were abusing the impeachment process to attack one of Joe Biden’s cabinet members during a crucial election year, in which immigration could play a decisive role. With Republicans in control of the House by a whisker-thin margin, and Democrats uniformly opposed, they can afford only a few defections. Two Republicans have already announced their opposition and a handful more appeared undecided as the House proceeded to debate the charges against Mayorkas. Republicans sought to impeach Mayorkas on charges that he willfully refused to enforce immigration law, resulting in record levels of migration at the US’s southern border, and “breached the public trust” by his actions. Congressman Tom McClintock, a California Republican, outlined his opposition in a lengthy memo in which he argues that the articles of impeachment “fail to identify an impeachable crime that Mayorkas has committed”. “In effect, they stretch and distort the Constitution in order to hold the administration accountable for stretching and distorting the law,” he wrote. Congressman Ken Buck, the retiring Colorado Republican who declared himself solidly opposed to the impeachment effort, said the accusations leveled against Mayorkas amounted to a “policy difference”, not an impeachable offense. “If we start going down this path of impeachment with a cabinet official, we are opening a door as Republicans that we don’t want to open,” Buck said on MSNBC shortly before the afternoon vote. Republicans rushed ahead with an impeachment vote, overriding the objections of Democrats and legal experts, including some prominent conservatives, who say they have failed to produce compelling evidence that the cabinet secretary had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitution’s bar for impeachment. “I respect everybody’s view on it,” House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. “I understand the heavy weight that impeachment is.” He described impeachment as an “extreme measure”, but said that “extreme times call for extreme measures.” During the floor debate on Tuesday, Republicans leveled broad accusations that Mayorkas had mismanaged oversight of the US-Mexico border, where arrests for illegal crossings have reached [record highs](https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-crossings-mexico-biden-18ac91ef502e0c5433f74de6cc629b32). “The constituents I represent do not understand why Texas has had to endure basically an invasion during the tenure of the secretary of Homeland Security,” Congressman Michael Burgess, Republican of Texas, said in floor remarks ahead of the procedural vote. “What are we left to do?” Mayorkas, a former federal prosecutor, never testified but mounted a forceful defense in a letter to Congressman Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican and chair of the committee on homeland security, where the impeachment articles originated. In it, the secretary declared: “Your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I have devoted most of my career.” [A Harvard-Harris survey](https://harvardharrispoll.com/) conducted this month showed that immigration is now an important concern for voters, with 35% of respondents citing the issue as their top priority. But Democrats say that the Republican impeachment effort is a political stunt rather than meaningful reform. “Do we have a problem at the border? Absolutely,” said Democratic congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. But, he said: “It’s clear that this is not about Secretary Mayorkas or a high crime and misdemeanor. It is about a policy disagreement with President Biden.” Trump has made the “crisis” at the border a focus of his presidential campaign and celebrated Republicans for impeaching Mayorkas on very shaky grounds. Across the Capitol, a border security deal recently brokered by the [Biden administration](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/biden-administration) and a bipartisan group of senators teetered on the brink of collapse, with nearly all of the Republican conference aligned against it. After months of painstaking negotiations, the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday that he saw “no real chance here to make a law” despite his support for the proposal. Even if the bill had a chance in the Senate, its fate was sealed in the House, where Johnson had already announced the proposal “dead on arrival”. Earlier on Tuesday, [Biden implored congressional Republicans to “show a little spine”](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/06/joe-biden-congress-mexico-border-security-bill-trump) and advance the legislation, which pairs a border clamp down with billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and Israel. In pointed remarks, Biden accused Trump, his predecessor and likely Republican rival in November, of tanking the deal and risking US national security for political gain. “All indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor,” Biden said in a speech televised from the White House. “Why? A simple reason. Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks this is bad for him politically.” Constitutional scholars and legal experts have argued that Republicans’ case against Mayorkas amounts to a policy dispute over a Democratic president’s handling of US border policy. Jonathan Turley, a conservative commentator and legal scholar, [said Republicans had uncovered “no current evidence that he is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense”](https://jonathanturley.org/2024/01/10/the-case-against-the-impeachment-of-alejandro-mayorkas/), while Alan Dershowitz, Trump’s defense attorney during his first impeachment trial, [wrote that Republicans were](https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4438471-republicans-who-voted-against-impeaching-trump-should-not-vote-to-impeach-mayorkas/) attempting to impeach Mayorkas on “vague and unconstitutional grounds”. “Whatever else Mayorkas may or may not have done, he has not committed bribery, treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors,” Dershowitz wrote in an op-ed for the Hill newspaper. The conservative [Wall Street Journal editorial board](https://www.wsj.com/articles/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-republicans-border-immigration-homeland-security-1a431a5d) took a similar view, questioning whether Republicans intended to use their majority to “accomplish anything other than impeaching Democrats”. Three former secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, including Michael Chertoff, who served under George W Bush and Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson, who served under Barack Obama, [said in a letter released before Tuesday’s vote](https://twitter.com/HomelandDems/status/1754942936234500213) that impeaching a cabinet official over “political disagreements” would “jeopardize our national security”. “Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas solves nothing and leaves our outdated immigration system exactly where it is now – broken,” they wrote.

/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73115370/1918134998.0.jpg) US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas holds a press conference at a US Border Patrol station on January 08, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images For the [second time this term](https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/9/13/23871948/biden-impeachment-inquiry-kevin-mccarthy), Republicans are pursuing an impeachment process with no evidence to justify it. This time, however, they might actually be able to impeach their target: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a [Biden administration](https://www.vox.com/joe-biden) official they’re trying to scapegoat on the issue of immigration. If a House vote proceeds on Tuesday evening as expected, and if House Republicans [stick together](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/06/johnson-biden-impeachment-mayorkas-00139735), Mayorkas will become the first cabinet official to be impeached in 148 years. The two articles of impeachment he faces accuse Mayorkas of failing to enforce existing immigration laws and obstructing House Republicans’ investigation into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies. After the vote, the process will head to the Democrat-led Senate for a trial, which is poised to result in a speedy Mayorkas acquittal, [if there is a trial at all](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/02/04/forget-about-a-senate-mayorkas-trial-00139489). As DHS secretary, Mayorkas oversees US border enforcement and immigration policies including the asylum process and detention. Because of his role, Republicans see him as an obvious official to blame for their grievances with an influx of crossings at the southern border. The only problem? Much as is the case with [President Joe Biden’s impeachment inquiry](https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/9/13/23871948/biden-impeachment-inquiry-kevin-mccarthy), they’ve provided no evidence of any “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitutional threshold that’s historically been used for impeachment. As in Biden’s case, they’ve also failed to scrape together much proof of Mayorkas’s wrongdoing at all. Additionally, it is [Congress](https://www.vox.com/congress) — and not Mayorkas — that is at fault for many of the gaps in the US immigration system, since lawmakers must approve appropriations in order to fund new programs or fresh policies that address existing holes. There has been little progress on real reform, however, for years. And while a [bipartisan group of senators released an immigration proposal on Sunday](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/us/politics/senate-border-deal-immigration-ukraine.html), its prospects are looking grim given former [President Donald Trump’s opposition to the idea of it](https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/1/25/24050278/senate-immigration-border-ukraine-trump-mcconnell-romney). Impeachment, and piling blame on the Biden administration, is ultimately a potent way of keeping voters’ focus on the issue of immigration in an election year. Republicans’ base voters are [highly energized by this issue](https://abcnews.go.com/538/immigration-driving-support-gop-primary/story?id=106777173), though Democrats and independents have [ranked it highly in recent polls](https://cis.org/Arthur/Immigration-Border-Are-Key-Issues-SwingState-Polling) as among their top concerns as well. All of that has left Democrats dismissing the impeachment as politically motivated and as counterprogramming meant to distract from the [myriad legal troubles likely GOP nominee Donald Trump faces](https://www.vox.com/trump-investigations/2024/1/17/24041580/trump-court-dates-2024-election-republican-primary). Despite the fact that Mayorkas’s impeachment trial will be dead on arrival in the Senate (meaning there’s virtually no chance he’ll be removed from office), House Republicans’ impeachment push helps achieve their objective of stirring up public scrutiny of Biden and keeping up their attacks on his immigration proposals. Additionally, it sets a shocking precedent for a politicized impeachment process, which lawmakers may well continue to use in the future. ### There’s not much there there Though the vote is likely to pass on party lines [if it does at all](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/06/johnson-biden-impeachment-mayorkas-00139735), impeaching Mayorkas has been polarizing even among Republicans due to the lack of proof. “They’re taking a fast track to using impeachment without doing their homework,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a more moderate lawmaker, previously [told The Hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4438543-mayorkas-impeachment-border-bill-senate-gop/). House Rep. Ken Buck, one of the last GOP holdouts and a Freedom Caucus member, also condemned the dearth of evidence the party offered. “This just isn’t an impeachable offense,” [Buck told The Hill.](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4442952-ken-buck-mayorkas-impeachment/) The first impeachment article accuses Mayorkas of not adequately enforcing US border security laws, noting that he has not detained people at the border after they apply for asylum. Typically, people are released as they await a trial, a process that can take [months or years](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-the-u-s-asylum-process-works#:~:text=Depending%20on%20the%20path%2C%20the,while%20their%20application%20is%20pending.). That’s in line with how administrations have long handled this issue — including during parts of Trump’s past administration. The second article alleges that Mayorkas has not sufficiently complied with the House’s investigation into DHS, though the secretary has said he’s testified seven times in front of lawmakers and responded to countless document requests. [Legal experts](https://time.com/6590641/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-gop/) have said that the House’s case is very thin. “Dislike of a president’s policy is certainly not one of \[the grounds for impeachment\],” Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri School of Law professor emeritus, [previously testified in Congress](https://time.com/6590641/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-gop/). Mayorkas has penned a seven-page letter defending himself and calling the accusations baseless. “You claim that we have failed to enforce our immigration laws,” [he writes](https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/DHS-Letter-to-CHS-1-30-24.pdf). “That is false.” ### The impeachment is a strategic political distraction Ultimately, the impeachment push is not about the substance of the allegations so much as the political purpose it serves for the GOP. Given the upcoming presidential election, Republicans have been eager to stress the issue of immigration since it’s such a top subject for their base and because they’re historically seen as more trustworthy on this issue than Democrats are. According to polling in Iowa and New Hampshire, immigration was the top issue for about [40 percent of GOP voters in both early states](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-voter-analysis-immigration-issues-republicans), followed by the [economy](https://www.vox.com/economy) and jobs. [A September 2023 NBC News poll,](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-republicans-advantages-immigration-crime-economy-rcna117054) and [others in the past](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republicans-have-edge-crime-immigration-ahead-us-midterms-reutersipsos-2022-10-05/), found that more voters of all ideological backgrounds think Republicans would do a better job on border security and immigration. The GOP’s focus on this subject may be resonating more this year because of growing global displacement and the increase in migrant crossings the US has experienced at the southern border. [In fiscal year 2023](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/us/politics/cbp-record-border-crossings.html), the US had a record-breaking number of apprehensions at the southern border because a growing number of migrants are fleeing conflict and poverty in their home countries. Republicans — including the [governors of Texas and Florida](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/migration-usa-bus/) — have also sought to draw attention to this surge in migration by busing and flying migrants to Democrat-led cities like New York City and Chicago that have scrambled to provide public services and shelter. Those efforts have increased awareness about this shift in migration in communities outside of the border and led [prominent state and local Democrats](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/jb-pritzker-letter-president-biden-migrant-crisis/) to call for more federal resources. “I think that in the past, what happens at the border is very much divorced from the lives of everyday Americans,” says Andrew Arthur, a policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank. “But as we’ve seen those impacts begin to flow to big cities, be it New York or Chicago or Denver ... people are starting to see that this has physical impacts that are being foisted on the cities and states for what is ultimately a federal responsibility.” On top of keeping the issue of immigration front and center, Republicans have also long sought to [weaponize attacks and investigations into the Biden administration](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/2/11/23594706/house-republicans-investigations-biden-mccarthy-jordan) as a way to distract from the [issues of their own likely presidential candidate](https://www.vox.com/politics/24055503/trump-trials-fani-willis-jack-smith-alvin-bragg). Per research from [political scientists Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1017/S0022381613001448), this has been helpful in the past, denting presidents’ approval ratings. The researchers found, for example, that if lawmakers spent 20 days per month on investigative hearings, the president’s approval rating would see a commensurate decline of 2.5 percent in that time. In anticipation of this year’s campaigns, a Mayorkas impeachment gives the GOP fodder to bring up in ads and an opportunity to attack the Biden presidency as they try to influence voters in their efforts to keep the House and take back the Senate and White House.

In 1876, the last US cabinet official to be impeached, [William Belknap](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment/impeachment-belknap.htm#:~:text=On%20August%201%2C%201876%2C%20the,further%3B%20he%20died%20in%201890.), resigned before the House could vote on the matter. Ulysses S Grant’s secretary of war was tried in the Senate anyway, on charges of corruption, but escaped conviction. Nearly 150 years later, in the House on Tuesday and at the second time of asking, Republicans corralled just enough votes to ensure Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, [suffered Belknap’s fate](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/13/mayorkas-house-impeachment-vote). But Mayorkas has not resigned – and nor is he likely to be convicted and removed. Democrats control the Senate, which means Mayorkas is all but certain to be acquitted at any trial, regardless of reported doubts among Republican senators about their party’s case. After the 214-213 vote to impeach, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, set out what will happen next. House managers will present the articles of impeachment after Monday’s President’s Day holiday. Senators will be sworn in as jurors. And Patty Murray of Washington state, the Democratic Senate [president pro tempore](https://www.murray.senate.gov/senator-murray-statement-on-being-elected-president-pro-tempore/), will preside thereafter. Schumer also issued [a stinging statement](https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/majority-leader-schumer-statement-on-house-republicans-sham-impeachment-vote). “This sham impeachment effort is another embarrassment for House [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans),” the New Yorker said. “The one and only reason for this impeachment is for Speaker \[Mike\] Johnson to further appease Donald Trump.” The Mayorkas impeachment is of a kind with Senate Republicans’ decision last week to detonate their own hard-won [border and immigration bill](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/07/us-senate-vote-bipartisan-border-bill) because Trump, their likely nominee for president, wants to campaign on the issue. Schumer continued: “House Republicans failed to produce any evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has committed any crime. House Republicans failed to show he has violated the constitution. House Republicans failed to present any evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense. This is a new low for House Republicans.” Most observers agree that the charges against Mayorkas – basically, that he performed incompetently and violated immigration law regarding the southern border – do not remotely rise to the level of “[high crimes and misdemeanours](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/what-does-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-actually-mean/600343/)”, as constitutionally required for impeachment and removal.  US House votes to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in historic vote – video Perhaps with a nod to the unfortunate Belknap, the Biden White House weighed in, saying: “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games.” But history also records that all impeachments (and impeachment efforts, such as that mounted by Republicans against Biden himself) are inherently political, so this one could prove as politically potent as did those of Trump. Both Trump impeachments concerned behaviour – blackmailing Ukraine for political dirt and inciting the January 6 attack on Congress – much closer by any standard to the status of high crimes and misdemeanours. Regardless, Republicans ensured Trump was acquitted in both and have since fed Trump’s fierce desire for revenge. The Mayorkas impeachment was driven by Trump-aligned extremists prominently including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Speaking to reporters on the Capitol steps on Tuesday, the same day the Senate passed a $95bn national security package including funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia, Greene said she was “very thankful to our Republican Congress. We’re finally working together with the American people to send a message to the [Biden administration](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/biden-administration) that it’s our border that matters, not other countries’ borders. Our border matters.” Claiming Mayorkas was guilty of “willful betrayal of the American people and breaking federal immigration laws”, Greene also said the impeachment “sends a message to America that Republicans can get our job done when we work together and do what’s important and what the American people want us to do.” [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/alejandro-mayorkas-first-impeachment-history#EmailSignup-skip-link-16) Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it matters **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion If there were any remaining doubt that Mayorkas was impeached in service of pure politics, Greene said senators set to sit as jurors should “look at the polling. They know that our border security is the No 1 issue in every single campaign in every single state, every single city, in every single community … They better pay attention to the American people.” It is not certain, however, that a trial will happen. [Joshua Matz](https://www.kaplanhecker.com/our-talent/joshua-matz), a lawyer who has written extensively on impeachment and worked on both impeachments of Trump, recently [told Politico](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/02/04/forget-about-a-senate-mayorkas-trial-00139489): “Impeachment trials are meant to be deadly serious business for matters of state – not free publicity for the House majority to air policy attacks on the current administration.” The Mayorkas impeachment articles, Matz said, are “so manifestly about policy disagreement rather than anything that could arguably qualify as high crimes and misdemeanours, that it would be unwarranted to waste the Senate’s time with the trial on the matter. “The articles are formally deficient in so many ways that any trial would be flagrantly unfair and create such grave due process issues that it would be outrageous to even proceed.” Senate Democrats could bring up a simple motion to dismiss the Mayorkas charges, a gambit which would be likely to succeed, given indicated support from the West Virginia centrist Joe Manchin, a key swing vote in the narrowly divided chamber. Less starkly, Democrats could seek to tie proceedings up in procedure, options including sending the charges to a committee, there to sit in limbo throughout an election year. All choices carry political peril, however. On Wednesday, the news site Semafor quoted an unnamed Republican aide as saying: “If Democrats give Republicans the opportunity to say that they are sweeping this under the rug, we will gladly take it. “If this is the sham Democrats claim it is, why would they be afraid of holding a trial?”

/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73138574/1918132905.0.jpg) US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas holds a press conference at a US Border Patrol station on January 8, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images [After an embarrassing flop last week](https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/2/6/24059709/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-republicans), House Republicans successfully impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday. This time around, the return of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) helped guarantee Republicans the votes they needed for the effort to advance, though the vote was still close: 214-213, with all Democrats and three GOP lawmakers — Reps. Ken Buck (CO), Mike Gallagher (WI) and Tom McClintock (CA) — voting against it. Mayorkas, who as DHS secretary oversees border security and programs like asylum, is now the first Cabinet official to be impeached in over a century. However, he’s unlikely to be forced out of office. To be removed, the Democrat-controlled Senate would have to vote to convict Mayorkas, and it’s not expected to do so. For Republicans, impeachment is little more than their latest political stunt, and another aimed at keeping focus on the southern border and the issue of immigration ahead of the [2024 election](https://www.vox.com/2024-elections). The vote is also an opportunity to try to distract from the GOP’s likely presidential nominee’s [many legal problems](https://www.vox.com/trump-investigations) by putting the attention on the [Biden administration](https://www.vox.com/joe-biden). And lastly, it’s a carrot that House Speaker Mike Johnson is using to generate goodwill with the far-right flank of the party as he battles to keep his leadership position and make progress on spending bills unpalatable to his most conservative colleagues. Although Republicans were eventually successful, the whole ordeal has highlighted how tenuous GOP unity continues to be, and how the party has struggled to make concrete progress on its goals this term. And it sets a concerning precedent for how impeachment can be used as a political weapon, since both Democrats and legal experts widely argued that nothing Mayorkas has done has reached the threshold of “[high crimes and misdemeanors](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S4-1/ALDE_00000282/).” ### Republicans’ politically motivated impeachment, briefly explained House Republicans have impeached Mayorkas on two articles, or charges. The first accuses Mayorkas of failing to properly enforce existing immigration laws because he has taken certain actions like not detaining asylum seekers while they await their court dates. That approach is consistent with past administrations, including how this issue was handled during part of the [Trump administration](https://www.vox.com/trump-administration). The second article alleges that Mayorkas obstructed the House investigation into DHS practices, a claim he has pushed back on, noting that he’s testified seven times and complied with numerous document requests. Democrats and legal scholars have argued that the allegations Republicans have levied do not meet the bar for impeachment. Instead they’ve said that such efforts are purely the result of policy differences and politically motivated. “This was a stupid, purely partisan impeachment. Republicans still can’t explain what misdemeanors Secretary Mayorkas allegedly committed, let alone any high crimes,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, [said in a statement](https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/rep-lieu-statement-partisan-secretary-mayorkas-impeachment). In fact, Republicans’ aims for pursuing this impeachment are pretty transparent. Because immigration is an issue that energizes their base, and one that Republicans are [seen as more trustworthy on](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-republicans-advantages-immigration-crime-economy-rcna117054) compared to Democrats, they’re hoping to draw attention to it in an election year. Primary polling has shown immigration to be the top issue for about [40 percent of GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-voter-analysis-immigration-issues-republicans), followed by the [economy](https://www.vox.com/economy) and jobs. A [significant surge in migrants in the last year](https://www.vox.com/policy/24066609/immigration-bill-border-migrants-crisis), conservative leaders’ efforts to bus and fly migrants to liberal cities, and statements by former [President Donald Trump](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/11/trump-promise-deport-millions-migrants-reality) have also helped to make it a key issue. Research, like that of [political scientists Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1017/S0022381613001448), has also found that negative inquiries into administrations can hurt a president’s approval ratings. The researchers found, for example, that if lawmakers spent 20 days per month on investigative hearings, the president’s approval rating would see a commensurate decline of 2.5 percent in that time. That’s been the case even when those hearings went nowhere. Republicans’ push, then, is really an effort to increase the negative scrutiny on President Joe Biden ahead of the November, election more than it’s about improving US [immigration policy](https://www.vox.com/immigration). Just last week, the GOP [rejected a chance](https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/2/5/24062710/senate-immigration-bill-border-security-ukraine-2024) to actually make the changes to the border they’ve long been agitating for.

[Nikki Haley’s exit from the presidential race](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/06/us/haley-out-trump-election-updates) this morning all but assures former President Donald Trump of the Republican nomination, in a contest that has been notably lacking in suspense. But that wasn’t always the case. As recently as a year ago, less than half of Republican voters in FiveThirtyEight’s [polling average](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/2024/national/) named Trump their preferred candidate. Was that unsettled landscape an illusion? Or were there moments along Trump’s road to victory that could have led to another outcome? I put this thought experiment to several political observers. They considered several moments that loom large in retrospect, starting in the final days of Trump’s presidency, and discussed how things might have gone differently. One scenario would have unambiguously changed the course of the election: a Senate conviction of Trump after his impeachment in the House of Representatives over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which would have paved the way for his disqualification from ever running again. Initially, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, [entertained the idea of supporting impeachment](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/mcconnell-backs-trump-impeachment.html). He told associates he was pleased that Democrats were moving to impeach Trump, believing that it would make it easier to purge him from the party. But when the decisive moment arrived, he [voted to acquit Trump](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/us/mcconnell-trump-impeachment-acquittal.html), who escaped conviction in the Senate by 10 votes. (McConnell [endorsed Trump today](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/politics/mcconnell-endorses-trump.html).) The Senate vote was an important early indication that the Republican elites who would have been happy for Trump to fade from the political scene were not going to take matters into their own hands, hoping instead that Republican voters would do the job. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-nomination-republican-candidate.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-nomination-republican-candidate.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-nomination-republican-candidate.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F06%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-nomination-republican-candidate.html).

  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaks during a press availability on Capitol Hill, Feb. 27, 2024, in Washington. Mark Schiefelbein/AP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has endorsed former President Donald Trump's campaign for a second term, despite consistently clashing with Trump for years. "It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States," McConnell said in a statement. "It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support." McConnell noted that during Trump's presidency, the two men worked together to pass tax reform and reshape the federal judiciary for a generation. He said he looks forward "to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration." The Senate leader has [consistently](https://www.npr.org/2022/02/15/1080407022/trump-vs-mcconnell-latest-round-between-gop-heavyweights-has-the-highest-stakes-) [clashed](https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/19/958410118/this-mob-was-fed-lies-mcconnell-rebukes-trump-for-his-role-in-capitol-riot) with [Trump](https://www.npr.org/2021/02/19/969139850/the-republican-rift-goes-far-deeper-than-just-trump-and-mcconnell), most forcefully after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. While McConnell did not vote to convict Trump during his impeachment trial after the insurrection, he said on the floor that "there's no question, none, that President Trump is [practically and morally responsible](https://www.npr.org/sections/trump-impeachment-trial-live-updates/2021/02/13/967701180/after-vote-mcconnell-torched-trump-as-practically-and-morally-responsible-for-ri) for provoking the events of the day." Trump has in turn bashed McConnell as the "establishment," and repeatedly made [racist remarks about McConnell's wife](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elaine-chao-issues-rare-rebuke-trump-racist-attacks-rcna67605), former Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao. The endorsement comes a week after McConnell announced he will be [stepping down](https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1163447619/mitch-mcconnell-steps-down) as Republican Senate leader in November.

Facing the prospect that they may never be able to impeach President Biden, House Republicans are exploring a pivot to a different strategy: issuing criminal referrals against him and those close to him. In recent weeks, a political and factual reality has set in on Capitol Hill. Despite their subpoenas and depositions, House Republicans have been unable to produce any solid evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden and lack the votes in their own party to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment. Instead, top G.O.P. lawmakers have begun strategizing about making criminal referrals against Mr. Biden, members of his family and his associates, essentially sending letters to the Justice Department urging prosecutors to investigate specific crimes they believe may have been committed. The move would be largely symbolic, but it would allow Republicans in Congress to save face while ending their so far struggling impeachment inquiry. It has the added appeal for the G.O.P. of aligning with former President Donald J. Trump’s vow to prosecute Mr. Biden if he wins the election. And it would avoid a repeat of the humiliating process House Republicans, who have a tiny and dwindling majority, went through last month with the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary. After [initially falling short of the votes to impeach Mr. Mayorkas](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/us/politics/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment.html), Republicans barely succeeded on the second try, only to realize that the Democratic-controlled Senate [was poised to quickly acquit him](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/politics/mayorkas-impeachment-republicans.html) — or even dismiss the charges without a trial. “There’s nothing that I’ve heard in the last couple of weeks that says that we are anywhere close to having the votes” for impeachment, said Representative Kelly Armstrong, Republican of North Dakota and the author of [the resolution authorizing the impeachment investigation.](https://armstrong.house.gov/media/press-releases/armstrong-introduces-impeachment-inquiry-resolution) Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F14%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbiden-impeachment-republicans-criminal-referrals.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F14%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbiden-impeachment-republicans-criminal-referrals.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F14%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbiden-impeachment-republicans-criminal-referrals.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F14%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fbiden-impeachment-republicans-criminal-referrals.html).

A White House spokesperson poured cold water on Republicans’ stated intention to invite Joe Biden to testify in public in his own impeachment hearings, lamenting “a sad stunt” and telling the rightwing congressman steering the effort: “Call it a day, pal.” James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, has led attempts to impeach the president over alleged corruption involving the business dealings of his son [Hunter Biden](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/hunter-biden). At the end of a long hearing on Wednesday, Comer said: “In the coming days I will invite President Biden to the oversight committee to provide his testimony and explain why his family received tens of millions of dollars … We need to hear from the president himself.” Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, responded swiftly and brutally. “LOL,” Sams [wrote](https://twitter.com/IanSams46/status/1770577655798091802), adding a face-palm emoji. He added: “Comer knows 20-plus witnesses have testified that \[Joe Biden\] did nothing wrong. He knows that the hundreds of thousands of pages of records he’s received have refuted his false allegations. This is a sad stunt at the end of a dead impeachment. Call it a day, pal.” Hunter Biden, who has [pleaded not guilty](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/11/hunter-biden-arraignment-federal-tax-charges-los-angeles) to federal tax and gun charges, has [testified](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/18/hunter-biden-house-republicans-private-deposition) in private. So has [James Biden](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/james-biden-republicans-impeachment-smirnov), the president’s brother. Wednesday’s hearing featured two Republican witnesses, both former associates of Hunter Biden. Tony Bobulinski appeared in person. Jason Galanis appeared by video link [from prison](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5110955/hunter-biden-business-associate-jason-galanis-testifies-prison) in Alabama, where he is serving a near-16-year [sentence](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/jason-galanis-sentenced-manhattan-federal-court-multiple-securities-fraud-schemes) for fraud. Another key source for Republicans, [Alexander Smirnov](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/14/company-paying-fbi-informant-trump-connections), was recently [imprisoned](https://apnews.com/article/hunter-biden-alexander-smirnov-detention-fbi-informant-0069256e9606617f890d0cf6771983ab) in Nevada after being charged with lying to the FBI about supposed corruption involving the Biden family. Smirnov has also been [linked](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexander-smirnov-fbi-informant-bidens-fraudster-in-prior-case/) to Russian intelligence. On Wednesday, Bobulinski and Galanis claimed Joe Biden was involved in family business activities, though a meeting described by Bobulinski took place in 2017, after Biden left office as vice-president and years before he beat Donald Trump to become president. Democrats called Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who worked with Rudy Giuliani on Trump’s attempts to find dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, efforts that led to the first of two Trump impeachments. “The only information ever pushed on the Bidens and Ukraine has come from one source and one source only: Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said. Amid grandstanding from members of both parties, Democrats sought to persuade the watching public the Republican impeachment effort was dead. “Our colleagues now are apparently preparing to save face by ending the impeachment farce with criminal referrals,” said Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the oversight committee. “But criminal referrals require evidence of crimes. And the only crimes we have seen are those of the GOP’s own star witnesses.” The attempt to impeach Joe Biden, Raskin said, had become “perhaps the most spectacular failure in the history of congressional investigations”. In his pushback efforts, Sams also cited commentators’ responses. Among them was Charlie Sykes, an anti-Trump Republican who [spoke to MSNBC](https://twitter.com/IanSams46/status/1770564778320097342). “What happened today was truly amazing even by our standards,” Sykes said. “It is one thing to say that this thing is falling apart but that actually understates how horrifically bad this is. “This was dumb and dumber.”

Alejandro Mayorkas is not guilty of a [high crime or misdemeanour](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/what-does-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-actually-mean/600343/), the Republican senator Mitt Romney said, making clear he will not vote to remove the US homeland security secretary from office if his impeachment goes to a trial. “Secretary Mayorkas is following the position of his party and of the president who was elected,” Romney, from Utah and his party’s nominee for president in 2012, told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “We have pointed out that President Biden is for open borders, as are the Democrats, and Mayorkas is simply following that policy. It’s the wrong policy, it has a huge damaging effect on the country – but it’s not a [high crime or misdemeanour](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/what-does-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-actually-mean/600343/).” Republicans have zeroed in on undocumented migration and the southern border as campaign issues in an election year. House Republicans impeached Mayorkas [in February](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/alejandro-mayorkas-first-impeachment-history) but have not yet formally sent the articles of impeachment across the Capitol to the Senate. On Tuesday, John Kennedy, a Republican senator from Louisiana, [told reporters](https://twitter.com/burgessev/status/1777780546908626987) that process would now be delayed until Monday. Under article two, section four of the US [constitution](https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S4-4-2/ALDE_00000699/), “the president, vice-president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours”. Debate over what exactly constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanours” is a constant of US political life. Impeachment is meant to be rare: from the founding until Donald Trump only two presidents were impeached and both, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were acquitted at trial. Donald Trump, however, was impeached twice: first for seeking to blackmail Ukraine for dirt on political rivals, second for inciting an insurrection, the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021. Romney was the only Republican to vote to convict both times. Now a lonely anti-Trump Republican voice, he will quit Congress this year. Democrats control the Senate, making conviction and removal of Mayorkas a near impossibility. But Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, must still decide what to do. Republicans are pressing for a trial. Schumer has indicated Democrats will do so, though they do not have to. Romney said: “Precedent is a matter of interpretation in this case. There have been impeachments that have been brought forward that did not go to trial in part because the people left office.” The last impeachment of a cabinet official concerned William Belknap, secretary of war to President Ulysses S Grant, in 1876. Belknap resigned, was tried anyway on charges of corruption, and acquitted. Romney did not say if he would vote to table the articles of impeachment, thereby avoiding a trial. “What does one do will depend on what the legal options are,” he said. “When to vote and how is uncertain at this stage. I believe a high crime or misdemeanour has not been alleged.”

Senate Democrats on Wednesday dismissed the impeachment case brought by House [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans) against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, on grounds that the charges failed to meet the bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined in the constitution as a basis for removing an official from office. In a pair of party-line votes, Democrats held that two articles alleging Mayorkas willfully refused to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and breached the public trust with his statements to Congress about the high levels of migration at the US southern border with Mexico were unconstitutional. On the first article, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted “present”. Democrats then voted 51-49 to adjourn the trial, just one day after House Republicans [presented](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment) the articles to the Senate. Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, moved to dismiss the charges outright, arguing that a cabinet official cannot be removed from office for implementing the policies of the administration he serves. “It is beneath the dignity of the Senate to entertain this nakedly partisan exercise,” Schumer said in a floor speech opening Wednesday’s session. [Constitutional scholars,](https://www.justsecurity.org/91123/constitutional-law-scholars-on-the-impeachment-proceedings-against-secretary-of-homeland-security-alejandro-mayorkas/) including [conservative legal experts](https://www.mediaite.com/tv/foxs-jonathan-turley-comes-out-against-house-republicans-impeaching-dhs-secretary-mayorkas/), have said the Republicans’ impeachment case is deeply flawed and weakens Congress’s most powerful tool for holding despots and delinquents to account. But Republicans pushed ahead, arguing that Mayorkas’ handling of the southern border warranted a historic rebuke. “This process must not be abused. It must not be short-circuited,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said, imploring Democrats to hold a full trial. “History will not judge this moment well.” After the Senate convened as a court of impeachment, Schumer offered his plan to hold votes to dismiss the two articles of impeachment after limited debate. Senator Eric Schmitt, a Republican of Missouri, immediately objected to Schumer’s proposal and accused the Democratic leader of “setting our constitution ablaze” by seeking to dispense with the charges against Mayorkas. The majority leader then called for votes to dismiss the trial, setting off a series of procedural maneuvers by Republicans to delay the proceedings, all of which were rejected 51-49 by the Democratic majority. Had they moved to a trial, Republicans still would have lacked the support of two-thirds of the Senate that is needed to convict and remove Mayorkas from office. Mayorkas has denied wrongdoing, defending the work of his agency as it grapples with soaring migration and a refusal by Congress to act. “As they work on impeachment, I work in advancing the missions of the Department of Homeland Security. That’s what I’ve done throughout this process,” Mayorkas said on Wednesday during an appearance on CBS to discuss a new federal initiative to combat online abuse of children. Democrats cast the impeachment effort as election-year political theater designed to draw attention to the situation at the border, one of the president’s biggest liabilities. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has made immigration the centerpiece of his campaign for the White House. “The impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas has nothing to do with high crimes and misdemeanors and everything to do with helping Donald Trump on the campaign trail,” Schumer added on Wednesday. He charged Republicans instead to join Democrats in passing the bipartisan Senate border bill aimed they derailed at Trump’s behest. Some Senate Republicans have expressed deep skepticism of the impeachment effort. But conservatives have cried foul and are preparing to deploy a series of procedural tactics in an effort to delay the vote ending the trial without arguments. “What Senator Schumer is going to do is fatuous, it is fraudulent and it is an insult to the Senate and a disservice to every American citizen,” said John Kennedy, Republican Senator of Louisiana, at a press conference on Tuesday. By a single vote, House Republicans impeached Mayorkas in February for his handling of the border. It was the first time in nearly 150 years that a cabinet secretary was impeached. But Mike Johnson delayed the transfer of the articles for several weeks, initially to allow the chambers more time to complete work on government funding legislation. Upon returning from a two-week recess, the House speaker again postponed the transfer at the request of Senate Republicans, who requested more time to prepare. The outright dismissal of the charges, without the opportunity to argue their case, was yet another setback for House Republicans, plagued by internal drama and a vanishingly thin majority. In a joint statement, House Republican leaders said: “The American people will hold Senate Democrats accountable for this shameful display.” The White House, meanwhile, applauded Senate Democrats for dispensing with what it called a “baseless” case. “President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas will continue doing their jobs to keep America safe and pursue actual solutions at the border, and Congressional Republicans should join them, instead of wasting time on baseless political stunts while killing real bipartisan border security reforms,” said the White House spokesperson Ian Sams. The proceedings began at 1pm, when Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, administered the oath of office to the Senate president pro tempore Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington. Each senator was sworn in as a juror and signed their name in an oath book. “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!” the sergeant-at-arms proclaimed, reminding senators that they are to “keep silent on pain of imprisonment” for the duration of the trial. Had the Senate moved to an impeachment trial, it would be the third time in five years. Trump was impeached twice during his presidency, first over his dealings with Ukraine and later over his involvement in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. He was acquitted both times by Senate Republicans.

/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73286141/2147867598.0.jpg) Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee about the fiscal year 2025 budget on April 16, 2024. Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images [Republicans’ political impeachment stunt](https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/2/14/24072478/alejandro-mayorkas-impeachment-house-republicans) against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas came to a head this week in the Senate, with lawmakers in the upper chamber voting to dismiss the charges. On Tuesday, House Republicans sent two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas to the upper chamber, and on Wednesday, senators were sworn in as jurors for a trial. The articles accuse Mayorkas of failing to enforce immigration laws, making false statements to [Congress](https://www.vox.com/congress), and obstructing oversight into DHS policies, all charges he denies. On Wednesday, the Senate rejected both articles, voting 51-48 along party lines to deem the first “unconstitutional” and 51-49 to dismiss the second article and adjourn the trial before it even really began. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted present on the first article. This is the first impeachment trial of a Cabinet secretary in more than a century. It’s likely to be remembered not as a historic moment of political accountability but as a marker of how polarized Congress has become over the last decade. The swift conclusion of the proceedings marks a win for Democrats and the [Biden administration](https://www.vox.com/joe-biden), who denounced the impeachment effort as a sham and a waste of resources. Democrats have long said that the behavior Mayorkas is accused of does not qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which is the legal threshold for impeachment. Republicans, meanwhile, wanted to drag the process out in order to draw more attention to the issue of immigration, and to use the proceedings as a platform to criticize the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Mayorkas oversees border security and asylum as DHS secretary, so going after him created an opportunity to focus on these subjects and to make election-year promises to voters that the GOP will fix issues at the border if it come back into power. These efforts come as immigration has become a more [potent campaign flash point](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/immigration-emerges-key-2024-wedge-issue-trump-vulnerability/story?id=106635907) this year because of the [surge in migration](https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/29/us/us-mexico-border-migration/index.html) the US has experienced[.](https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/29/us/us-mexico-border-migration/index.html) ### The “trial” showdown, briefly explained In February, the House voted to impeach Mayorkas after almost a year of hearings and investigations. Republicans argued that he did not properly enforce immigration laws, citing, in one case, [the decision to release migrants](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4600362-mayorkas-impeachment-dismissed-trial/#:~:text=The%20House%20articles%20embraced%20an,statutes%20Republicans%20say%20Mayorkas%20violated.) after they arrived at the southern border. In fact, that’s an established practice followed by multiple administrations, in part because the US does not have sufficient space to detain people as they await immigration hearings. Republicans also said that Mayorkas had made false statements to Congress because he testified that the border was “secure,” and that he blocked oversight by failing to respond to subpoenas and offer sufficient access to his office. Mayorkas has [pushed back against the charges,](https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/DHS-Letter-to-CHS-1-30-24.pdf) noting that his approach may differ from that of Republicans, but he’s been committed to immigration enforcement and has worked to comply with Congress’s oversight of the agency by providing testimony and documents. [Many Constitutional law experts](https://time.com/6554103/mayorkas-impeachment-hearing-criticized/) also said Republicans had not shown that the charges reached a legal bar for impeachment, and that they instead seemed to be founded on policy disagreements. “If allegations like this were sufficient to justify impeachment, the separation of powers would be permanently destabilized,” wrote top scholars, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky, [in a January letter](https://www.justsecurity.org/91123/constitutional-law-scholars-on-the-impeachment-proceedings-against-secretary-of-homeland-security-alejandro-mayorkas/). The first phase of the Senate trial on Wednesday took place because the upper chamber needed to fulfill its constitutional duty. Following a House impeachment, the Senate’s job is to hear the charges and determine whether the person should be convicted. If an official is convicted — which requires a two-third majority vote — they would then be removed from their position. The Senate also has the option to dismiss, or table, the impeachment articles if a simple majority votes to do so. Ultimately, that’s what happened on both articles against Mayorkas, though it wasn’t without some drama. During the process, Republicans were able to force additional votes on “points of order,” or procedural motions regarding how the impeachment should move forward. They used this platform to slam Democrats repeatedly for not holding a full trial like those seen during the impeachment proceedings of former Presidents [Donald Trump](https://www.vox.com/donald-trump) and Bill Clinton and to try to delay the trial to a later date. The GOP points of order all largely failed on party lines. ### The impeachment is political messaging in a campaign year The impeachment itself is part of a broader GOP strategy to keep the focus on immigration as Republicans campaign on border security ahead of this year’s presidential election. It’s a strategy that’s worked for them before, including in 2016, when Trump made building a wall at the southern border a central promise of his campaign. The general public has also historically viewed Republicans as more trustworthy on border security than Democrats. [A September 2023 NBC News poll](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-republicans-advantages-immigration-crime-economy-rcna117054) found that 50 percent of voters trust Republicans on this issue, compared to 20 percent who trust Democrats. Immigration has been especially resonant this year because there’s been a [high number of unauthorized crossings](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/record-number-migrant-border-crossings-december-2023/) at the southern border as global displacement has increased and [as instability in some South American countries](https://abcnews.go.com/International/inside-deteriorating-conditions-forcing-south-american-migrants-flee/story?id=106633665) has forced people to flee. State Republican leaders, including [Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/28/23528510/migrant-bus-christmas-harris-dc-abbott), have drawn attention to this development by busing and flying migrants to Democrat-led cities such as New York City and Chicago. Democratic leaders, including [New York City Mayor Eric Adams](https://www.vox.com/24063986/cities-migrant-crisis-border-overwhelmed-shelters) and [Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson](https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2024/04/08/biden-migrant-work-permits), have kept the focus on the influx of migrants as they’ve sought help from the federal government and [imposed harsh eviction policies](https://www.vox.com/24112835/chicago-migrant-evictions-homeless-shelters). In response to the Mayorkas impeachment, Democratic lawmakers have called Republicans’ focus on the issue [disingenuous](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/democrats-mayorkas-impeachment-misdemeanors), as GOP leaders, [including Trump](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4459861-trump-praises-collapse-of-bipartisan-border-deal/), have opposed efforts to pass bipartisan immigration reforms that could help address some of these challenges. As a result of the attention it’s received in recent months, immigration has become a top issue in key swing states that Republicans hope to flip in order to win back the presidency and retake certain Senate seats. [A March 2024 Wall Street Journal poll](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/election-2024-immigration-issue-voters-84916a17) found that immigration was one of voters’ top two issues in seven key swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada. According to research from [political scientists Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1017/S0022381613001448), approaches like this have successfully dented presidents’ approval ratings in the past. The researchers found, for example, that if lawmakers spent 20 days per month on investigative hearings, the president’s approval rating could see a commensurate decline of 2.5 percent in that time. But while the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas was designed to cast negative attention on the Biden administration as Trump navigates countless legal scandals of his own, Senate Democrats’ quick dismissal has dulled much of its impact.

  An official Senate photographs shows senators taking the oath at the start of the Senate impeachment trial on Wednesday. The U.S. Senate The Senate has rejected [both articles of impeachment](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/17/1245249027/mayorkas-impeachment-trial-senate-border-debate) against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, swiftly ending the trial triggered by the House's narrow [vote to impeach in February](https://www.npr.org/2024/02/13/1230977868/house-impeachment-mayorkas-border). The articles charged Mayorkas with willfully ignoring the law and breaching the public's trust. Democrats called the opposition a policy dispute, and said it did not rise to "high crimes and misdemeanors," as required for impeachment. Republicans say Mayorkas is refusing to enforce immigration laws. "By doing what we just did, we have in effect, ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after senators killed the second article. "No evidence, no procedure. It's not a proud day in the history of the Senate." In a press conference after the trial, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he felt "very strongly that we had to set a precedent that impeachment should never be used to settle policy disagreements." He said the Senate had to ward against partisan impeachments. "If we allowed that to happen, it would set a disastrous precedent for Congress," he said. "Anytime the House would want to just shut the Senate down, they could send over another impeachment resolution." House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters he was "deeply disappointed" that the Senate dismissed the charges, saying "there should have been a full trial." He said Mayorkas was "probably the least effective and I think most dangerous, in terms of his policy implementations, of any cabinet secretary in the history of the United States." Johnson predicted there would be a "reckoning" over the border issue in the November election.   House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and their fellow Republican impeachment managers walk back through the U.S. Capitol Rotunda after transmitting articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate on Tuesday. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The Biden administration said the Democratic-led Senate made the right call and dismissed Republican efforts to attack Mayorkas unfounded. "Today's decision by the Senate to reject House Republicans' baseless attacks on Secretary Mayorkas proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment," said Department of Homeland Security Spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg. Republicans in both chambers are eager to put the issue of border security front and center during this election year. President Biden's handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border remains a weak spot politically for him, according to [recent public opinion polls](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242285012/biden-trump-2024-election-poll).

Media caption, Watch: What led to Mayorkas' historic impeachment... in two minutes **The US Senate has voted to kill impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, sparing him a trial in the chamber.** It was the first time in almost 150 years, and only the second time in US history, the Senate had considered the impeachment of a cabinet secretary. If two-thirds of the chamber had approved, Mr Mayorkas would have been removed from office. He was accused of refusing to enforce immigration law. Mr Mayorkas was also charged by the US House of Representatives with breaching "the public trust" by making false statements during congressional testimony. In near-party line votes on Wednesday, senators dismissed the two articles of impeachment filed by the House two months ago. The Department of Homeland Security welcomed the result. The agency's statement said the vote to dismiss "proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment". Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had proposed a process by which Republicans would be allowed to make speeches and offer procedural motions before Democrats would forge ahead with in a vote to dismiss the charges. When Republicans objected, demanding a full trial on the merits of the Mayorkas case, Mr Schumer, a New York Democrat, moved to force a vote that effectively dismissed the first impeachment charge. "We gave your side an opportunity," Mr Schumer said. "Your side objected. We are moving forward." The Republicans made several unsuccessful attempts to delay the vote, which were blocked by the 51 Democrats in the chamber. In the end, all Democrats voted to dismiss the first impeachment charge. All but one of the 49 Republicans objected, with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski abstaining. The process repeated itself with the second impeachment charge, although Ms Murkowski joined her Republican colleagues. The chamber then voted 51-49 to formally end the impeachment trial proceedings less than four hours after the 100 senators took the oath to serve as jurors. Republicans had hoped to use the impeachment trial to call attention to what they have characterised as the failings of the Biden administration's immigration policy and the surge of undocumented migrants who have crossed the US-Mexico border in recent years. They expressed outrage at Mr Schumer's quick move to end the Senate's part in the constitutional impeachment process in only a matter of hours. They said it broke with tradition and set a bad precedent for future impeachment proceedings. "If the Senate held a full impeachment trial, the Border crisis evidence would gut the Biden administration like a fish," Republican Senator John Kennedy posted on social media before the vote. "Senator Schumer won't even let the House make its case, no matter how much it blows up the Senate." Former US President Donald Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representative twice during his presidency. Both times he was acquitted by the Senate after full trials. Senate Republicans had attempted to dismiss the charges against Mr Trump before his first impeachment trial - the same tactic used by Mr Schumer on Wednesday - but their efforts were unsuccessful. Democrats, for their part, said that the Republican-controlled House, which impeached Mr Mayorkas in February by a one-vote margin after a previous attempted failed, was abusing the impeachment process. "This is the least legitimate, least substantive and most politicised impeachment trial ever in the history of the United States," Mr Schumer said. "Impeachment should never be used to settle policy disagreements." Public opinion polls show that immigration is one of the top issues concerning American voters in advance of November's presidential and congressional elections. Earlier this year, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate had negotiated a compromise package to reform immigration law and provide more funds for border security. The effort failed, however, after Mr Trump and conservative Republicans argued the legislation did not go far enough and was designed to help Democrats defuse the matter as a campaign issue. Republicans are sure to cite the decision by Democrats not to allow a full impeachment trial as evidence that the party does not want to address immigration. They may use it on the campaign trail, particularly against Democratic senators running for re-election in more conservative-leaning states. * [Immigration](/news/topics/c770z2d9v15t) * [US immigration](/news/topics/cljevyzxlelt) * [US politics](/news/topics/cwnpxwzd269t) * [United States](/news/topics/cx1m7zg01xyt)

Senate Republicans outraged at Democrats’ quick move to kill the impeachment of Alejandro N. Mayorkas without a trial warn that the precedent set could give rise to a nightmare scenario for Democrats in the future. It would go something like this: Democrats in control of the House move to impeach and remove an out-of-control Republican president. Republicans who lead the Senate label the charges woefully flawed and well below the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard established in the Constitution. They dispose of the counts without so much as a hint of a trial. While names weren’t being named, it was lost on absolutely no one on Capitol Hill that the alignment of a Democratic House, a Republican Senate and a Republican president is at least conceivable next year, with the White House possibly occupied by the already twice-impeached Donald J. Trump and both chambers potentially under new management. Republicans urged Democrats to pay heed. Democrats’ decision to [dismiss the impeachment charges without an airing of the case](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/us/politics/johnson-ukraine-israel-aid-house.html) “means the next time a president is impeached by the House, that a majority in the Senate of the same political party as the president could just refuse to try the case,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and one of two men seeking to be the party leader in the next Congress. Democrats say it was Republicans who were abusing the once-rare and deadly serious process of impeachment by using it to try to remove an administration official over a policy disagreement on immigration and border security. The real mistake, they argue, would have been to treat the case Republicans brought against the homeland security secretary as legitimate, rather than a thinly veiled attempt to amplify border security as a political issue and create chaos in the Senate. “If we start cheapening impeachment, which is what they’ve done by letting a policy issue become impeachment, there will be impeachment all the time,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in an interview. “It will allow the House to tie up the Senate.” Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F04%2F18%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fmayorkas-impeachment-precedent.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F04%2F18%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fmayorkas-impeachment-precedent.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F04%2F18%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fmayorkas-impeachment-precedent.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F04%2F18%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fmayorkas-impeachment-precedent.html).

In the folk wisdom of recent American politics, Donald Trump is a figure of herculean invulnerability to traditional scandal. What lands as a crippling blow to most politicians leaves nary a scratch on Trump, who effortlessly deflected the slings and arrows of the 2016 presidential campaign and paid no discernible price for the “Access Hollywood” tape, his racism or his general incoherence. As the tribune of a discontented, “forgotten” people, this folk wisdom goes, Trump draws strength from efforts to hold him accountable. To try to halt Trump’s march is to make him more popular, and more powerful, than he was before. We saw this view of Trump at work in the run-up to his first impeachment. “Why Democrats’ Attempts to Rein in Trump With Impeachment Could Make His Presidency Stronger,” [declared](https://time.com/5751532/why-democrats-attempts-to-rein-in-trump-with-impeachment-could-make-his-presidency-stronger/) Time magazine on the eve of the House impeachment vote in 2019. We saw this view again, in 2021, after Trump was acquitted by the Senate following his second impeachment. “Trump,” [wrote The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/13/donald-trump-impeachment-trial-analysis-acquittal), “always thrived on the principle that what does not kill him makes him stronger.” At the moment, Trump is on trial for falsifying business records as part of his attempt to suppress public knowledge of his affair with Stormy Daniels, a porn star. As part of their case against the former president, prosecutors for the state of New York have accused Trump of spearheading an effort to catch and kill stories that might have undermined his 2016 bid for the White House. If convicted on any of the 34 felony counts arrayed against him, Trump — the first former president in American history to be criminally prosecuted — could face up to four years in prison. Trump could even go to jail now, if he continues to violate the gag order imposed by the judge, Juan M. Merchan. Strangely, as the trial unfolds and a prostrate, palpably demoralized Trump awaits his fate, the folk wisdom about his supposed invulnerability has [re-entered the bloodstream](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hush-money-trial-could-help-trump-2024-presidential-race-2024-04-16/) of our political discourse. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F10%2Fopinion%2Ftrump-trial-not-invincible.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F10%2Fopinion%2Ftrump-trial-not-invincible.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F10%2Fopinion%2Ftrump-trial-not-invincible.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F10%2Fopinion%2Ftrump-trial-not-invincible.html).