The Washington Post
| By Amber Phillips – January 31, 2024 Instead of passing a law with President Biden to crack down on illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border, Republicans in Congress are moving quickly to impeach the Cabinet official who oversees it. This is a highly political act that won’t help the border crisis, and even some conservative legal scholars and Republican senators are skeptical of doing this. Here’s what’s going on and how it’s tied to the broader immigration battle that is dominating U.S. politics right now. Why so many migrants are coming: More than 6 million migrants have come to the border under the Biden administration; 2.3 million have been released into the country. There’s a debate about whether it’s in reaction to economic forces outside of politicians’ control, or whether migrants are reacting to having a more lenient president in office. As the U.S. economy recovers more quickly than most nations after the pandemic, there’s a huge labor demand in the United States right now. But fairly or not, migrants across the globe have also perceived Biden as more willing to let people in than President Donald Trump was. |
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| Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in November on Capitol Hill. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
| Congress has the power to impeach presidents, judges and Cabinet officials. But Cabinet officials are rarely impeached because they are often just implementing the president’s policies. “I think it’s the first time an impeachment drive over policy disagreements has gotten this far,” said Josh Chafetz, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown University. Having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” is the bar for impeachment of a federal official. By the assessment of even top conservative legal experts, Republicans have not met that threshold. “Bad policy is not a high crime,” writes conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley. Politics is playing a huge role: It’s good politics right now for any politician to sound tough about the border. Really tough. Trump is on his way to winning the Republican nomination by demonizing immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”Biden campaigned four years ago on a more humane approach to the border. But as border crossings surge to record highs, he says the government should be able to block migrants from entering if the border becomes “overwhelmed” — which is what a bipartisan bill being negotiated in the Senate right now would do.“If given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law,” Biden said last week. Why Biden says the border is a problem: Biden and Republicans say the huge rush of migrants has opened up the border to dangerous people sneaking through — although Trump takes much more liberty by categorizing all border crossers as dangerous. Most are people escaping danger and economic hardship back home. And the vast majority of convicted fentanyl traffickers have been U.S. citizens, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. The real-world impact of impeaching Mayorkas is minimal: House Republicans will vote next week to impeach him. But he’ll still get to keep his job. The Democratic-controlled Senate is highly unlikely to convict him.But through all of this, Republicans are weaponizing immigration to break the norms of democracy. They are voting to impeach Mayorkas over policy disagreements rather than actual “high crimes and misdemeanors.”It raises the question of what’s to come next in this increasingly heated election-year battle over immigration. |