Republican US House poised to vote whether to impeach Biden border chief

© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas takes his seat to testify before a Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on the department’s budget request on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 26,

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives’ Republican leadership faced a test on Tuesday of whether it could hold enough of its narrow majority together to vote to impeach President Joe Biden’s top border official.

Concerns over immigration have become a top issue in this year’s election campaign, with Republican former President Donald Trump preparing for a likely November rematch with Biden. Trump has separately been pushing congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan border security deal unveiled on Sunday.

The House’s Homeland Security Committee last week approved two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a near-unprecedented step to take against a member of a president’s cabinet over a policy dispute.

With a narrow 219-212 majority, Republicans will need near unanimity to pass the measures, though even if they do, the Democratic-majority Senate is all but certain to acquit Mayorkas.

At least two Republicans have said they will not support the measure. Representative Tom McClintock on Tuesday said the investigation into Mayorkas had failed to “identify an impeachable crime,” and Representative Ken Buck made a similar statement on Monday.

House Republicans allege that Mayorkas was intentionally lax in securing the long border with Mexico and violated the public trust by making false statements to Congress.

Around 2 million migrants were arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal 2023.

Mayorkas has denied any wrongdoing and has defended his tenure.

The House vote comes a day before the Senate is expected to take a first procedural vote on the tough new bipartisan border security bill, which House Speaker Mike Johnson has said would be “dead on arrival” in his chamber.

The only other time the House voted to impeach a cabinet member was in 1876, when a secretary of war was investigated for corruption. The Senate acquitted him.

“Secretary Mayorkas’ actions, both in his intentional refusal to enforce our laws and abandoning the confidence of Americans, require us to act,” House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole said on Monday as his panel prepared to set the rules for debating the impeachment charges before the full House.

“If he will not do his duty, then, unfortunately, the House must do its constitutional duty,” Cole said.

Democrats have condemned the impeachment exercise as an effort to score political points against Biden and his administration in the run-up to the November elections.

Representative Bennie Thompson, the senior Democrat on the panel, called the effort a “pre-planned, predetermined scapegoating of the secretary” made up with “cooked-up vague, unprecedented grounds.”

Democrats and some legal experts have said the impeachment charges fall well short of evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” under the Constitution’s impeachment requirement.