No sitting American cabinet member has ever been impeached by Congress — still.
That’s because the House of Representatives on Tuesday defeated an ill-advised, obviously merely partisan attempt to bring impeachment charges against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary over the immigration policies of his boss, President Joe Biden.
The impeachment would never have succeeded in the end, because it couldn’t have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Still — impeachment trials are big deals — political circuses — as the nation recalls from the two endured by Donald Trump when he was president.
The defeat of this effort by still-new GOP Speaker Mike Johnson was not un-circus-like on its own merits, and it very nearly succeeded in sending the case to the Senate.
Despite the initial defections of three Republican House members, Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and California’s own Tom McClintock, the vote was looking good for Johnson until Rep. Al Green, a Texas Democrat, came to the House floor in his hospital gown in order to vote No.
McClintock, by the way, was not exactly expressing his support for his fellow Californian Mayorkas with his vote. “This border crisis can’t be fixed by replacing one left-wing official with another,” he said before the vote.
Others may not brand the former United States Attorney for the Central District of California under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as precisely left wing.
But McClintock was precisely right in remarks on the House floor about why the impeachment notion was a bad one: Members of presidential cabinets “can be impeached for committing a crime relating to their office, but not for carrying out presidential policy.”
That simple fact is all Americans need to know about why this impeachment effort was a bad idea, an idle display of politics for politics’ sake, a waste of time and effort that had nothing to do with good governance.
Mayorkas, as a member of a presidential cabinet, serves at a president’s pleasure, and whether he does that well or poorly is up to the president to say. What that cabinet member does — unless he has gone rogue — is what the president tells him to do.
After the vote, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, McClintock again got to the heart of the problem here: “It dumbs down the standard of impeachment to a point where it will become a constant fixture in our national life every time the White House is held by one party and the Congress by another. That’s exactly what the American Founders feared, and that’s why they were very careful to specify narrow limits to its use.”
Even though the Mayorkas impeachment effort unexpectedly failed at the House level — because of the unanimous Democratic opposition, the defection of three Republicans, and the unexpected return of the hospitalized congressman — and even though any later successful House vote on the issue would not likely pass in the Senate, we can expect to see its return.
That’s because, while it was initially most vocally backed by an extremist in the GOP caucus, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — she criticized McClintock for his vote, saying he failed to “read the room’; he replied that following the Constitution, not “the room,” is his job — Speaker Johnson sees the failure as a rebuttal to his leadership, and will bring it back.
“Democracy is messy. We live in a time of divided government. We have a razor-thin margin here and every vote counts,” Johnson said. “We will pass those articles of impeachment. We’ll do it on the next round.”
That’s unfortunate, both for the real need for reform of American immigration policy, and because it fuels the future of this new attitude in Congress: You impeached our president, and so we’ll try to impeach one of yours.
That kind of tit-for-tat is the wrong way to run a republic.
