“This delay is an abuse of power & denies POTUS his day in court,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W. Va.), one of the more pragmatic GOP lawmakers, wrote on social media. “Send it or end it!”
The next day the House speaker at the time, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), realized the error of this strategy and announced she’d send her impeachment managers across the Capitol the following week, beginning a trial almost four weeks after the House’s votes.
So much for any form of consistency more than four years later.
On Wednesday, House Republicans failed to march their articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate, as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had previously announced for his plan.
Instead, we live in a political world in which the most fervent opponents of Mayorkas — who believe he should be convicted in a Senate trial and removed from office — are the ones actually delaying the start of the trial.
Now, sometime next week, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, the trial will finally begin, more than two full months after the House took the unusual step and voted to impeach a cabinet member for the first time since 1876.
In impeaching Mayorkas, Republicans have turned the most powerful constitutional duty that Congress has — removing executive branch officials for “high crimes and misdemeanors” — into a farcical journey of blunder and mismanagement.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who spent the first three years of President Biden’s tenure as a key swing vote who frustrated liberal activists, summed up the GOP mishandling of the entire saga in a floor speech Wednesday. Manchin pledged his full support to the Democratic plan to short circuit the trial quickly once Johnson finally sends the articles over and senators are sworn in as jurors.
“It is basically something that I can’t wait to vote against and get it out as soon as it comes here,” he said.
That vote was originally going to come Thursday afternoon, if the managers had delivered the articles Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has laid out a plan to follow the more than century-old mandate for starting impeachment trials at 1 p.m. each day.
But Senate conservatives realized just how quickly defeat would come if they held a trial this week, and they used back channels to the House speaker to plead with him to delay the trial until next week.
In a stunning admission of how little traction their effort to oust Mayorkas had gained, these hard-line GOP senators explained that the Senate has become so duty-bound by their Thursday afternoon departure schedule that some Republicans might just leave town or agree to quickly dismiss the trial.
“We don’t want this to come over on the eve of the moment when members might be operating under the influence of jet fuel intoxication,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said at a Tuesday news conference.
Why fail on a Thursday when you can instead drag out that failure four or five days later, for no apparent gain?
This bungled impeachment effort is only compounded by the fact that the underlying dispute — the crisis at the border of migrants flowing into the country — comes on the single best policy issue on the Republican side. Every poll shows critical independent voters, who will decide the November elections, giving Biden, Mayorkas and Democrats terrible grades for handling the border.
The House Republican effort to impeach Biden over financial impropriety by family members has crumbled amid witnesses getting indicted on a charge of trading secrets to Russia or going on the global lam to avoid charges here.
Instead, the Mayorkas impeachment took hold as the major oversight trophy the House GOP hoped to show for its incredibly weak hold on the majority the past 15 months.
Congressional Democrats, as well as quite a few Senate Republicans, have never agreed with the House GOP’s thesis that Mayorkas violated the Immigration and Nationality Act, which mandates the detention of any deportable migrant. These critics and skeptics essentially see this as a policy dispute, given a cabinet secretary’s broad discretion to enforce laws, and that the way to handle policy disputes is through elections.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who voted to impeach Donald Trump twice, told reporters Tuesday that the “standard has not been met for a conviction,” and he could join Democrats in dismissing the case at the outset of the trial.
That argument rang true to three House Republicans, which is why the Mayorkas impeachment began in such farcical fashion.
On Feb. 6, Johnson and his leadership team rolled the dice to hold the vote to impeach anyway believing there were only 211 Democrats present to vote — and that they would win 215-214, despite three defections from their side of the aisle.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) had been in touch with a hospitalized Democrat, Rep. Al Green (Texas), and got him to the floor in time to cast a vote that left the House deadlocked 215-215.
Rather than accept defeat, Johnson used a parliamentary tactic to hold a do-over the following week, calling House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) back to Washington after he’d been at home recovering from a bone-marrow transplant.
One extra vote was all Republicans needed — so long as they held the vote early on the evening of Feb. 13.
They feared that, about two hours after their narrowest-possible-margin impeachment of Mayorkas, Democrats would win a special election on Long Island and their margin would disappear. Indeed, Democrats won that race, and if the House had to hold another vote now on Mayorkas, and all members showed up and voted as they had before, the impeachment articles would fail on another tie vote.
Johnson immediately took the Pelosi approach to handling impeachment articles, but far outdoing the slow-moving Democrats from four years ago. House Republicans adjourned for a two-legislative break, then spent almost a month fighting over government funding.
When they finally approved the remaining funding bills, on March 22, the House again adjourned for another two-week break.
Finally, a timeline appeared for the Senate to consider the impeachment trial, mapped out between the offices of Johnson and Schumer.
Senate Republicans, who have been bitterly divided the past six months over issues related to the border and funding Ukraine’s defense against Russia, came around on the idea that almost all of them would endorse the plan to force a full impeachment trial of the cabinet secretary.
Upon returning to the Capitol Monday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters he did not quite fully understand the House case against Mayorkas, doubting its validity, but would vote to hold a full trial.
Aside from Lee and a handful of his far-right allies, Senate Republicans give off the vibe that they want to get come credit for voting for a full trial from conservative activists.
At the same time, their statements give off a halfhearted nature that demonstrates, deep down, little desire to turn over the Senate floor to prominent MAGA lawmakers like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), two of the House managers who would try the case if it went to a full trial.
Each day so far this week, Republicans have lined up to give long speeches about impeachment and the border crisis.
Capito delivered one of them Wednesday afternoon, noting that never before had an impeachment trial been dismissed at the outset. She made no mention of her own vote in January 2021 to dismiss charges against Trump for the Capitol riot, nor did she mention her January 2020 statements demanding a speedy trial or no trial at all for the first Trump impeachment.
“This time,” she said, “it should be no different.”
