Rep. Jim Jordan laid out the case for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, telling The Washington Times he “deserves it” after having overseen an unprecedented surge of illegal activity at the southern border.
Mr. Jordan, who is in line to become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over impeachment should Republicans win control of the chamber in November, said the decision to pull the trigger will be made collectively.
But the Ohio Republican, in an interview with The Times, signaled his support for the idea.
“Mayorkas deserves it,” Mr. Jordan said. “He’s told us how many times the border is secure and you almost want to say, like, ‘what are you talking about?’ There’s not a rational person with an ounce of common sense who thinks the border is secure. We don’t really have a border anymore, and we’ve had a record number of millions of illegal migrants coming across, so he certainly deserves it, but that’ll be a decision we make as a committee and one that we make as a conference.”
Mr. Mayorkas is the most likely first target as Republicans eye control of the impeachment power, but he’s not the only possibility.
Various GOP lawmakers have introduced measures backing impeachment against President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. None of them have gone anywhere in the Democrat-controlled chamber.
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The Mayorkas impeachment resolution, sponsored by Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, has garnered the most support, with more than 30 GOP members signing on.
Asked if the votes for impeachment are there, Mr. Jordan paused.
“I don’t know, but I do think there is strong sentiment among House Republicans, particularly House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee that Mayorkas has done an absolutely terrible job,” he said.
Impeachment requires only a majority vote in the House.
Once an official is impeached, the Senate then holds a trial. It takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate for conviction and removal from office.
Only one Cabinet official has ever been impeached, in 1876, and the Senate did not vote to convict in that case. Several others have resigned while impeachment proceedings were underway in the House.
Written more than a year ago, Mr. Biggs’s measure describes the case against Mr. Mayorkas as “a pattern of conduct that is incompatible with his duties.” That included halting the construction of the border wall while overseeing the catch-and-release of unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants, and a rise in the trafficking of illegal drugs such as fentanyl.
Mr. Jordan said the case against Mr. Mayorkas would be a “failure to enforce the law and secure the border in a general sense.”
He said the number of terrorism suspects trying to sneak into the U.S. could become part of impeachment proceedings. From Oct. 1 through Aug. 30, Border Patrol agents recorded nabbing 78 people who appear on the government’s terrorist watchlist.
Mr. Jordan earlier this year confronted Mr. Mayorkas over the number and demanded to know what happened to them.
“Have they been sent back? Were they released? What’s the status? He said, ‘I don’t know.’ That in and of itself would raise concerns of are you fit for this job,” Mr. Jordan said.
Homeland Security declined to comment.
In the past, Mr. Mayorkas brushed aside calls for his ouster. He told CNN earlier this year he wasn’t concerned. “I am focused on mission,” he told the network.
He has defended his decisions as restoring humanity to an immigration system that he says tilted too far during the Trump years. Mr. Mayorkas says he has a vision for a safe, secure and orderly flow of migrants and he’s trying to execute those plans.
Critics wonder why those plans weren’t in place before he led the dismantling of the Trump-era tools that had largely calmed the border.
Calls for Mr. Mayorkas’s ouster have begun to increase recently.
Chad Wolf, who served as acting secretary in the Trump administration, told The Times’ “Politically Unstable” podcast in August that there was a “very strong case” for impeaching him.
“Your job is to enforce the laws as Congress has written,” Mr. Wolf said. “There’s a number of things Congress has told you to do, and if you say, ‘I’m not going to do that because I have limited resources and I’m just going to exempt whole [categories of] people from that,’ I would say that’s a good case of you’re ignoring the law.”
A former ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, who served in the Trump administration, also said Mr. Mayorkas should face impeachment.
The GOP’s appetite for impeachment has been fueled partly by the two impeachments of President Trump, both of which failed to win enough votes for conviction in the Senate.
from
https://digitalalaskanews.com/jim-jordan-ready-for-mayorkas-impeachment-in-gop-run-house-failure-to-enforce-the-law/
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