House Republicans are ready to take their sham impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate this week, where they’ll likely find a hostile jury. That’s if the Senate decides to even have a trial.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made it clear in February, after the House voted to impeach, that he views the whole fiasco a waste of time.
“This sham impeachment effort is another embarrassment for House Republicans,” he said in a statement. “House Republicans failed to produce any evidence that Secretary Mayorkas has committed any crime. House Republicans failed to show he has violated the Constitution. House Republicans failed to present any evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense.”
Last month, he called the whole thing “absurd.”
The House impeachment managers—including extremists Andy Biggs of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia—will likely present their case on Wednesday, with senators sworn in as jurors on Thursday. Then it will just be a matter of how fast the Senate dispenses with it.
Schumer wrote to Democrats Friday, giving them a preview of the next few weeks of work, including impeachment, and hinted that his likely course of action will be to move to dismiss the charges.
“I remind Senators that your presence next week is essential,” he wrote. That’s because he needs all Democrats present to vote on that motion to dismiss.
He’ll have them. Even West Virginia’s Joe Manchin has trashed the impeachment.
“It’s crap. Pure crap,” he told reporters in February. “No trial at all, it’s ridiculous. The trial will be in November. No. You start that craziness and play games and that stuff?” He added that Cabinet officials “work for the president. You got a problem, go to the polls.”
He also said he believes there are sufficient votes to dismiss the impeachment. “I just want to get rid of it as quick as possible. You go down that path, that’s a slippery slope, you’ll never stop,” he said in February.
There are at least three Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah—who have been skeptical enough about the whole thing to help Democrats dispense with this quickly. Romney even suggested in February that he’d vote to dismiss.
“If there is a policy difference, it’s with the president, not the secretary that reports to him,” he said.
Republican leader Mitch McConnell paid lip service to conducting a trial in remarks last week, but didn’t show much enthusiasm for it. “[T]he Democrats have a majority, so it may not go on very long,” McConnell told reporters. “But my preference would be to actually have a trial. But I think the majority is likely to prevent that.”
Officially, Senate Republicans will make noises about having that trial. Republican Whip John Thune said at a recent leadership press conference that the House “has determined that Secretary Mayorkas has committed impeachable offenses” and that he thinks “the Senate needs to hold a trial.” How strenuously they’ll try to make that happen is another question—particularly considering who they’ll be teaming up with in the House. After all, Biggs and Greene will be among those coming to the Senate floor with this bullshit. How many GOP senators are going to want to ally with those guys?
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