Facing a second impeachment vote this week, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas denounced the GOP’s accusations against him and claimed that only Congress can fix what he described as a “crisis” on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“They’re baseless allegations, and that’s why I’m not really distracted by them,” Mayorkas said in a Sunday interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, who asked the Homeland Secretary about impeachment articles accusing him of “wilfully not following the laws” regulating immigration.
House Republicans failed to muster enough votes to impeach Mayorkas last Tuesday, falling just a single vote short. (One of the three Republicans who voted against the measure, Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher, announced Saturday that he was not seeking re-election. His vote against impeachment had already earned him a primary challenger.) The 216-214 tally—which was later adjusted to a tie after Utah Representative Blake Moore changed his vote—was a stunning embarrassment for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who admitted that the vote’s failure “was a setback” but vowed to bring the articles to a vote again.
This time around, Republicans are hoping that the return of Louisiana Representative and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who missed the vote due to cancer treatment, will put them over the edge. Yet the possibility that Tuesday’s special election in New York to replace disgraced former Representative George Santos will break for the Democrats means that House Republicans are facing a tight window to move on impeachment articles, as their razor-thin majority could become even thinner. A second Mayorkas impeachment vote could come as early as Tuesday.
Though Mayorkas said Sunday that he wasn’t worried about being impeached, he did agree with President Biden’s comments describing the ongoing border situation. “It certainly is a crisis, and we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system, and we’re dealing a tremendous amount within that broken system,” he said. “But fundamentally, Congress is the only one who can fix it.”
Mayorkas was referencing the chaos that overtook the Senate early last week, when the vast majority of GOP Senators killed a bipartisan border bill supported by President Joe Biden that would have represented a significant crackdown on immigration. Only four Republicans ended up voting for the deal. On Friday, Donald Trump, who campaigned vociferously against the deal, bragged about having “crushed Crooked Joe’s disastrous open border bill.”
“A bipartisan group of senators have now presented us with the tools and resources we need — a bipartisan group,” Mayorkas said Sunday, “and yet Congress killed it before even reading it.”
