House Republicans have finally succeeded in impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — by a single vote. To hear some of them tell it, that, more than what happens next, is what counts.
Of course, the House’s impeachment vote isn’t the end of the road; the Senate must now take up the matter in some form. And how the Senate handles trying Mayorkas will play a significant role in how this effort, which some key voices on the right have criticized as overzealous and pointless, is ultimately regarded by voters in 2024 and by history.
The Senate can’t just ignore the impeachment, though it could also hold a truncated trial or create an evidentiary committee with a lower profile to consider the case.
The key question now is how many Senate Republicans might vote to acquit him — or even to dismiss the charges, should such a motion be made after House impeachment managers present their case.
The latter would be unprecedented in modern impeachments and would send a strong signal about the seriousness of the effort.
The GOP-aligned legal experts, former Republican officials and three House Republicans who opposed impeaching Mayorkas aren’t the only ones to raise red flags about this process. (Most of them have cited the idea that House Republicans are watering down impeachment by basically impeaching Mayorkas for policy differences rather than high crimes and misdemeanors.) So too have many Senate Republicans — as many as 10 of them.
A sampling of those raising principled concerns:
- Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) this week called the impeachment “the worst, dumbest exercise and use of time.”
- Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said two weeks ago that the House was “targeting a member of the administration without doing their homework to find precisely why he should be impeached.”
- Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said last month that impeachment “is never the answer just to disagreements on policy.”
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) echoed that, casting Mayorkas as simply “carrying out the policies of the White House.”
- Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) suggested recently that it was a waste of time — “a detour from the important work that’s going on.”
- Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said last month that he hadn’t seen evidence of impeachable offenses, adding of the Mayorkas and Biden impeachment inquiries: “So far they’ve got nothing.”
- Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) warned of the overuse of impeachment, saying: “We’ve got so many things to do.” She suggested that House Republicans’ real issue is with “the president’s policy.”
The final four names above were among the six Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Mayorkas in 2021, and they would seem to be the leading edge of potential GOP defectors.
It’s hardly unprecedented for members of the impeaching party to ultimately vote to acquit. No Democrats did so in either of Donald Trump’s impeachments, but 10 Republicans voted to acquit Bill Clinton on one impeachment charge, and five on another. Going back further, 10 Republicans voted to acquit Andrew Johnson, saving him by a vote.
But if several Republicans voted to acquit, the trial could feature a higher percentage of senators voting to acquit than any of these presidential impeachments. (The high water mark there: the 55 percent of senators who voted to acquit Clinton on one of his charges.)
Perhaps most significant would be if there were a motion to dismiss the charges that garnered GOP support. Democrats could pass one without GOP votes — it requires only a bare majority, which Democrats have — but having Republican senators say this isn’t even worth their time would say plenty.
A 1999 motion to dismiss the charges against Clinton was opposed by every Republican. Ditto Democrats on a motion to dismiss charges against Trump after Jan. 6, 2021.
It remains to be seen whether Democrats might pursue dismissing the charges. The risk is that it might look like they didn’t take the matter seriously. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) this week warned of “accountability and consequences” if senators “just throw it in the trash.” But having even some Senate Republicans vote to dismiss would undermine the idea that it was a serious exercise. And some of the comments above indicate that a handful of them indeed don’t see it as a particularly serious one.
As for how that might play publicly? There hasn’t been anything amounting to a major public clamoring for impeaching Mayorkas. A YouGov poll last week showed 35 percent of Americans favored impeaching Mayorkas. Fewer — 26 percent — opposed it, but 39 percent didn’t offer an opinion either way. Another recent YouGov poll shows about half of Americans can’t even venture an opinion of Mayorkas.
Perhaps Republicans just wanted to send a message by impeaching him — to emphasize that they’re trying to do something about the border crisis and to cast a spotlight on Mayorkas.
But the uneasiness within their ranks about this process still looms. Senate Republicans have made increasingly clear they’re not big fans of how their House counterparts are conducting business, including by killing off a bipartisan border security bill.
Mayorkas’s impeachment would seem to give them a chance to actually register their professed dismay about the lack of serious policymaking.
correction
A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to the impeachment of President Andrew Jackson. It was President Andrew Johnson. The article has been corrected.
