Schumer says Mayorkas impeachment was policy dispute
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Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) remarked that the upper house had set a very important precedent by dismissing impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without a trial.
Back in January, House Republicans released two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas over what they said was the secretary’s failure to manage the US-Mexico border. They failed to impeach the Biden administration member on February 6, but succeeded on the 13th, moving the charges to the Senate for a trial. The Senate dismissed both the articles of impeachment Wednesday.
The precedent that was set, according to Senator Schumer, was that impeachment should not be reserved for settling policy disagreements.
“That is what the impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas was from the start: a policy dispute, frankly, to help Donald Trump on the campaign trail,” said Senator Schumer on the Senate floor. “It did not meet the high standard required by the Constitution to remove someone from office.”
“I am very glad the Senate worked its will to set these charges aside.”
He explained that the impeachment would have caused chaos in the executive branch as well as in the Senate.
“The prudence and cool judgement the Senate showed yesterday is what the Framers would have wanted. They didn’t want impeachment to be used for every policy dispute, that when you don’t agree with a cabinet secretary you impeach them. That would have created chaos in the executive branch and here in the Senate, because the House could just throw over impeachment after impeachment. And if you’d have to have a whole big trial on every one of them, the Senate could be ground a halt.”
He repeated what he said a day earlier, “We felt it was very important to set a precedent that impeachment should never, never, be used to settle policy disagreements. We are supposed to have debates on the issues, not impeachments on the issues.”
Senator Schumer added that the House could paralyze the Senate.
“We are not supposed to say that whenever you disagree with someone on policy, then that is a high crime and misdemeanor,” he said. “Can you imagine, the kind of chaos and damage that would create? As I said, The House could paralyze the Senate with frivolous trials, particularly when one party had the House and the other had the Senate. It would degrade government and it would frankly degrade impeachment, which is reserved – rarely – for high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The Senate majority leader elaborated how unprecendented what the House did was.
“No cabinet secretary has been impeached since I think 1876,” he explained. “And even in that case, he resigned before the trial. It was never intended to happen.”
Calling House Republicans “hard, radical right,” Senator Schumer said they are “just so intent on paralyzing government, creating chaos in government, even destroying government, that they don’t care.”
He added, “But we in the Senate, on our side of the aisle, did care. My guess is a lot of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle cared too.”
The Democrat senator from New York said his party welcomed debate on immigration and that bipartisan legislation is how the border can be fixed.
“If my colleagues on the other side want to talk about immigration, Democrats welcome that debate,” concluded the senator, adding, “Welcome it. We should debate border bills like the ones Republicans blocked here on the floor. That is how you fix the border: with bipartisan legislation. Impeachment would have accomplished nothing.”
Following the dismissal of the articles, the official X account of Senate Republicans posted, writing that Democrats don’t want the publich to see the evidence against the Homeland Security secretary.
The next post on the thread read, “Democrats are welcoming 9.4 million illegal immigrants and counting.”
The official Senate GOP account’s next post compared the Trump administration’s policy with that of the Biden administration.
In the next, and final, post on the thread, GOP Republicans wrote, “Senate Republicans will fight to secure the border and hold the Biden administration accountable for the border crisis they created.”
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