The House Homeland Security Committee announced it will meet next Tuesday to vote on articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
All Republicans on the committee have indicated they will vote for impeachment, which would send the matter to the full House for a vote.
No sitting Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached, though one in the Grant administration was impeached after resigning.
Committee Chairman Mark Green said Mr. Mayorkas’ oversight of the historically abysmal southern border has earned ouster.
“After three years of this crisis and a year of investigations and proceedings, we must move forward with accountability,” the Tennessee Republican said on Wednesday in announcing the vote.
The House voted on articles of impeachment in November, with a bipartisan majority voting to send the resolution to Mr. Green’s committee for action. Under that directive, the panel held two hearings this month examining whether Mr. Mayorkas’ conduct rose to the level of an impeachable offense.
One hearing featured Republican state attorneys general while the other heard from two women who said their daughters were victims of the border chaos. One daughter died of a fentanyl overdose while the other was slain by a man authorities say was a migrant who crossed into the U.S. illegally then caught and released by the Biden administration despite having MS-13 gang ties in El Salvador.
Democrats have complained that the impeachment push is hasty and ill-founded.
They have suggested the GOP is breaking House rules by not giving Mr. Mayorkas more chances to defend himself, and by shutting down Democrats’ participation.
Democrats say the impeachment is a political attack over policy differences, and that nothing Mr. Mayorkas has done rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors demanded by the Constitution for impeachment.
Republicans say Mr. Mayorkas has lied to Congress and the public, has defied court orders and has refused to carry out laws enacted by Congress. The latter charge is likely to get the most attention.
The impeachment proceedings come even as Mr. Mayorkas is negotiating a border security deal with Senate Republicans, and as he’s trying to work with Mexico to curtail the unprecedented flow of people streaming into the U.S.
The House is also pursuing impeachment proceedings against President Biden as it investigates whether he was involved in an influence-peddling scheme with his son Hunter Biden.
To be impeached requires only a majority vote in the House. To be convicted and removed from office takes a two-thirds vote in the Senate.
In the first impeachment go-around in November, the House was considering a single article of impeachment written by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican.
Her resolution was derailed on a 209-201 vote, with eight Republicans joining Democrats in voting to refer the measure to the Homeland Security Committee.
Normally that referral would be a way to kill a proposal, but Mr. Green and his committee instead treated it as an official charge of duty and ran with it, escalating an already existing investigation of Mr. Mayorkas into an official impeachment proceeding.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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