From the first moment Republicans took the House majority, they’ve had their eye on impeachment.
Specifically, conservatives and some GOP leaders have had their sights set on impeaching President Joe Biden—for reasons to be named later. But as their long Biden impeachment crusade has failed to turn up anything sizable yet, House Republicans turned their attention to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas was supposed to be the perfect mark. But on Tuesday, impeaching him proved to be a task one vote too high.
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The House rejected the Mayorkas impeachment 214-216, with one Republican switching his vote when it was deadlocked at 215-215 in order to make it easier procedurally to bring the impeachment resolution back up for a vote.
House GOP leaders are already vowing to bring the resolution back up when they have more support—or when more Democrats are missing from the Capitol. But if there was one lesson from the failed impeachment escapade it was that the GOP’s effort to mar Biden with some manufactured impeachment proceedings is going to be even harder than it seems.
The Mayorkas vote was supposed to be the easy one. The Homeland Security Secretary is the Biden administration official most responsible for overseeing border security. And as illegal southern border crossings surge, House Republicans have made border enforcement and immigration restrictions their marquee issue for the 2024 campaign cycle.
For the historically unproductive House GOP majority, impeaching Mayorkas was supposed to kill two birds with one stone.
Republicans could finally claim an impeachment win, getting payback for House Democrats successfully impeaching former President Donald Trump twice. And the GOP could tell voters they had taken action on the border—even though impeaching a sitting cabinet secretary without a Senate conviction would have, functionally, accomplished nothing.
Instead, Republicans actually accomplished nothing.
“We should have gotten this done,” a visibly frustrated Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) said after the vote. “I think here's just another opportunity for the Republicans to show the American people we're serious about border security.”
“We got an administrator over there that doesn't care,” Nehls continued. “The American people are dying every day from fentanyl. He lies to the American people in the camera. And what do we do? We don't do anything.”
The two articles of impeachment for “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust” narrowly failed after three Republicans joined every Democrat to vote no.
At the last moment, a fourth Republican, Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT), switched his vote to yes so leadership could try to impeach Mayorkas again later—perhaps as soon as tomorrow if Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was absent receiving cancer treatment, returns on Wednesday.
“People aren’t upset. They’re embarrassed,” a source close to GOP Leadership told The Daily Beast. “What are Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise doing? Can Louisiana’s finest not whip votes? Imagine if they’re in charge when we’re in the minority next year.”
With the Mayorkas impeachment dead for the time being, some Republicans were applying those lessons to the Biden impeachment efforts.
“I've always said I think you have a better opportunity to impeach Mayorkas than Biden,” Nehls said.
“I don’t think we have the will to do it,” he added. “Shameful.”
Ahead of the vote Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) told The Daily Beast he would be “shocked” if the Mayorkas impeachment failed.
“It’s extreme, but there are very few secretaries either that have ever been negligent of their duties like Mr. Mayorkas,” said Zinke—who served as Interior Secretary under Trump and resigned while facing Inspector General and Department of Justice ethics investigations.
But on the Biden impeachment effort, Zinke was less sure, calling that vote “a little ways off.”
“If you're gonna swing, I don't want to see a swing and a miss,” Zinke said of a Biden impeachment vote.
Only one cabinet secretary has ever been impeached: Secretary of War William Belknap. The House unanimously impeached Belknap in 1876 for corruption, but he evaded a Senate conviction. Presidential impeachments are somewhat more common—Trump was impeached twice, joining Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson who were both impeached once.
The House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees have breathlessly tried to add Biden to that list, getting a boost of authority from a GOP-backed House vote approving a full-scale investigation. The Oversight Committee—led by Rep. James Comer (R-KY)—has attempted to tie Biden to his son Hunter’s sketchy business dealings. But the committee’s lack of criminal evidence has left Republicans’ aimless and embarrassed.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC)—a prominent member of the Freedom Caucus and supporter of both impeachment efforts—reasoned that the House GOP failing to coalesce behind a Mayorkas impeachment could signal that a Biden impeachment may be on shaky footing.
“If this fails, if they’re not gonna impeach a guy that’s violated statutes then, then I guess there’s not enough votes there. The same would apply to Biden,” Norman said Tuesday. “But who knows, he’s the one giving the orders.”
Conservative Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC)—another supporter of Mayorkas’ impeachment—said he does not want to impeach Biden, further illustrating the Biden investigation’s tough road to courting sufficient GOP support. “I don't want to impeach the president. I don't,” Wilson told The Daily Beast. “My view is the American voters are going to take care of that.”
But some Republicans were cautious of overlearning anything from this shaky Mayorkas effort.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), one of the leaders of the impeachment inquiry, said he doesn’t believe the failed Mayorkas impeachment spells any sort of trouble for a vote to impeach Biden.
“I never said that we're absolutely going to do it, I said we're going to do the investigation. I think the evidence is compelling already, but we'll see if we go with the articles and if we have the votes at the right time,” Jordan said.
Had it been successful, the Mayorkas impeachment would have offered a notable bit of counter-programing from the House. On Monday a Senate-led, Biden-approved bill pairing immigration reforms with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan went up in flames after Republicans insisted the package didn’t go far enough to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border.
An impeachment of Mayorkas the next day would have helped House Republicans regain their title as leaders on border security issues in Congress, after they seemed to put politics over policies they say have led to a crisis. A successful vote would have signaled in some way that House conservatives are holding the Biden administration accountable for its border policies. Instead, Republicans just appear to be in even more disarray.
House Republicans have been talking about impeaching Mayorkas for months, with the Homeland Security Committee finally holding impeachment hearings in January.
Among their complaints, Republicans accuse Mayorkas of wrongfully overhauling the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that blocked migrants from crossing the Southern border until an immigration court date. The Biden administration has instituted a “catch and release” protocol that allows migrants into the country. And Republicans also claim Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements” and has obstructed their inquiry by failing to produce documents.
(The Biden administration dismissed GOP allegations as “baseless” in a Monday statement.)
Speaker Johnson has championed the impeachment efforts, saying Tuesday he hasn’t seen a cabinet secretary who so “blatantly, openly, willfully and without remorse did the exact opposite of what federal law asked him to do.”
“It’s an extreme measure, but extreme times call for extreme measures,” Johnson said.
As Johnson greenlit a vote last week, Republican hopes of impeaching Mayorkas went sideways, with the House GOP’s paper-thin majority and Scalise’s absence only allowing Republicans to lose two GOP votes.
First, perennial impeachment skeptic Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) announced his opposition last week, arguing that a policy disagreement does not meet the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard.
By Tuesday morning, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) had dropped a damning 10-page memo—which opened with a passage from the 1966 western flick A Man for All Seasons—saying his fellow Republicans “stretch and distort the Constitution” to hold the Biden administration accountable.
The third no vote, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), reportedly warned his colleagues in a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday that impeaching Mayorkas would open the floodgates for future impeachments of cabinet secretaries.
The dissent riled Republicans, with many GOP lawmakers exasperated that members of their own party keep stymieing legislation.
“It’s really shocking that people can’t see that he has chosen not following his constitutional oath, that we do have a humanitarian and national security and health crisis that's going on,” conservative Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) told The Daily Beast.
Democrats, who voted unanimously against the Mayorkas impeachment, can now count its failure as another omen that the Biden investigation is on a road to nowhere—not that Dems needed more indications.
“The Biden impeachment hopes are dead anyway because the American people and a number of Republicans realize that it is a completely evidence-free, fact-free allegations that they have wasted this Congress’ time,” said House Oversight Committee member Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who helped lead Trump’s first impeachment as a staffer.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) offered an even sharper assessment of the GOP’s impeachment aspirations.
“This is a bullshit exercise. Let's put it bluntly,” McGovern told The Daily Beast. “And there's no basis for this. And there's really no basis to impeach President Biden, right? It's a colossal waste of time.”
