Homeland Security Secretary became the first Cabinet member to be impeached by the House in nearly 150 years Tuesday night, and Democrats from the president on down were clearly unhappy about the history-making event.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, claimed that the move was simply an attempt by House Speaker Mike Johnson to “appease” former President Donald Trump.
“This sham impeachment effort is another embarrassment for House Republicans,” Schumer told HuffPost after the vote. “The one and only reason for this impeachment is for Speaker Johnson to further appease Donald Trump.”
Schumer: “This sham impeachment effort is another embarrassment for House Republicans. The one and only reason for this impeachment is for Speaker Johnson to further appease Donald Trump.
“Republicans failed to present any evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense”
— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) February 14, 2024
“Republicans failed to present any evidence of anything resembling an impeachable offense,” he added.
It seems to me that if the move by House Republicans were truly an embarrassment, they wouldn’t need Schumer to point it out, but I also don’t think they needed President Joe Biden to tell them that “history would not look kindly” upon them for their work if in fact that’s what is going to happen. That, of course, didn’t stop him.
“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday evening.
As Biden is wont to do, he then launched into irrelevant points that a logic professor would refer to as red herrings — arguments intended to distract readers from the actual points in question.
Should Biden be impeached next?
For example, Biden described Mayorkas as “a Cuban immigrant who came to the United States with his family as political refugees.” That’s true, but so what? The House shouldn’t impeach officials who weren’t born in the U.S.?
If anything, Biden’s statement would seem to reinforce the Republican position — that Mayorkas has failed to enforce immigration law. It would seem, at least intuitively, that as an immigrant himself, Mayorkas may harbor a bias — conscious or otherwise — in favor of immigrants that would lead him into the sort of lax prosecution of illegal immigrants for which the House impeached him.
Biden moved immediately on to another meaningless argument, that Mayorkas “has spent more than two decades serving America with integrity in a decorated career in law enforcement and public service.”
Even if we grant the truth of that statement without argument, a history of purportedly honorable past service is also largely irrelevant to the question of how much “integrity” he is bringing to his current role.
Nonetheless, never a master of logical debate, Biden doubled down on his reasoning — and I’m using that term euphemistically — by claiming that his DHS secretary had “upheld the rule of law faithfully and has demonstrated a deep commitment to the values that make our nation great.”
Of course, reasonable people understand that terms like “faithfully” and “deep commitment” can be defined differently — in fact, Biden, Mayorkas, me and you, dear reader, would probably not even be in complete agreement about exactly which are the “values that make our nation great.” Biden appears to be trying to serve as a character witness in Mayorkas’ impending Senate trial, but subjective statements of character lose to objective statements of fact every time.
And they should.
He then moved on in his statement to demanding that Congress vote to give his administration “the tools and resources needed to address the situation at the border,” referring to what he would like the American people to think of as the “bipartisan” plan developed in the Senate to address the border.
That plan has already been declared dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House, and the fact of the matter is that it has very little Republican support even in the Senate where it originated.
Moreover, while conservatives don’t tend to be huge fans of government by executive order, the fact remains that Biden could easily reverse his earlier reversal of border policies put in place by Trump to at least mitigate some aspects of the border crisis. That’s may not be the best way to see America governed, but it’s both legal and self-evidently effective.
But let’s not bother the president with annoying little things like facts. He’s too busy with his divisive partisan rhetoric to pay any attention to them anyway.
