Semafor Signals
The reactions to Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’ impeachment vote
Insights from El Universal, Semafor, and USA Today
The News
The House voted 214-to-213 Tuesday to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, notching a win for Republicans after the same effort narrowly failed last week in embarrassing fashion. Republicans pinned the vote to what they see as Mayorkas’ failure to control the immigration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, sparking criticism from Mexico’s president.
Mayorkas is now slated to stand trial in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict him.
SIGNALS
Mexican president slams politically-motivated impeachment vote
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called Mayorkas’s impeachment “unfair” and politically-motivated, saying it was more about the upcoming U.S. presidential election than the crisis at the border. His government has criticized U.S. President Joe Biden for bending to the will of Republicans by tying immigration policy to funding for Ukraine and Israel in the recently failed national security package. One expert in migration wrote in El Universal, “This impasse between Republicans and Democrats shows that for both migration is a currency that they are willing to negotiate to the last consequences in order to get more votes.”
Democrats could successfully stop the impeachment trial, but it might backfire
Democrats have legal reasons and procedural moves that could kill the impeachment trial. They could argue that a trial would be waste of the Senate’s time because Mayorkas’ impeachment articles are “manifestly about policy disagreement rather than anything that could arguably qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors,” a lawyer who worked on Donald Trump’s impeachments told Politico Playbook. Senate Democrats could also raise a simple motion to dismiss the charges, which would likely succeed, the Guardian reported. But these moves could backfire.
“If Democrats give Republicans the opportunity to say that they are sweeping this under the rug, we will gladly take it,” one Republican aide told Semafor’s Kadia Goba. “If this is the sham Democrats claim it is, why would they be afraid of holding a trial?”
Democrats believe impeachment stunt is to ‘appease’ Donald Trump
Several Democrats and some anti-Trump Republicans framed the impeachment vote as a GOP stunt to cater to their likely presidential nominee. “The one and only reason for this impeachment is for Speaker [Mike] Johnson to further appease Donald Trump,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “This is what Republicans do, they feed the MAGA base,” former GOP Rep. Carlos Curbelo told MSNBC. Trump’s grip over the Republican Party is tightening with successful pushes to kill the Senate’s bipartisan immigration and foreign aid bill. While Trump hasn’t been vocal about the Mayorkas vote so far, USA Today’s national political correspondent suggested that while “we haven’t seen his fingerprints on that yet… we’re pretty sure they exist.”
