Republican members of the U.S House of Representatives are hard at work trying to advance the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Over the weekend, Texas Representative Michael McCaul said GOP members of the House “have to work to push the impeachment across the finish line asap, as communities throughout the country continue to be affected by the mess at the southern border with Mexico.
As he said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday:
“This one man is the architect of destruction down here. One man has caused all this chaos, deaths from fentanyl poisoning, danger to the country with terrorists coming in and 8 million encounters with no legal status. He is the architect. He has destroyed the fabric of this nation.”
McCaul further said that “breach of trust” was something that the founding fathers thought was enough for a federal government official to be impeached. That’s why the GOP intends to move forward with its plan.
The Texas representative outlined a potential timeline for the act, with impeachment articles being released at the end of this month, and then the formal impeachment vote not long after that.
Republicans serving on the Homeland Security Committee in the House have already voted to move this effort forward to the full chamber. Victims of the southern border crisis testified in front of the committee in an emotional situation.
While Republicans are on board with the impeachment, Democrats are calling it just a “MAGA spectacle.” It’s very unlikely that any Democrats will support the impeachment, so the GOP in the House will have to be completely united for it to be successful.
Only a simple majority is needed for Mayorkas to be impeached, but the GOP only has a slight advantage in the lower chamber.
During his appearance on Fox News, McCaul was also pressed by host Maria Bartiromo about why congressional Republicans ultimately agreed to another continuing resolution to keep the federal government from shutting down.
McCaul responded:
“I didn’t kick any can down the road. I didn’t want to take my football and go home and not play on the football field. You can’t win the game if you’re not on the field, and the fact is, it would jeopardize our military readiness at a very dangerous time. …
“I was with our border patrol all day yesterday for me to come home and tell them we’re not going to give you your paychecks to do your job, and that’s insulting.”
McCaul added that they need “about a month” to get everything in order. This includes coming to an agreement on not just overall funding levels, but also on additional border security measures that many Republicans have been demanding in exchange for full passage of an omnibus spending bill.
He continued:
“We want to get a border security package. We didn’t have it in agreement, and that’s unfortunate. The whole process should have been done a year ago, but we had to make a decision where we were.”
