Of course Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, should not have been impeached, and good on the United States Senate this week for dismissing the trumped-up charges against him before his trial even got underway.
He committed no high crimes nor misdemeanors in carrying out his duties, which, whether or not the House Republicans who forced the issue, or the Senate Republicans who voted along party lines, like it, involve carrying out the policies of the president.
If they want to impeach the president over his policies about immigration and the southern border … well, let’s not go there. There’s equally no case for impeachment.
But how absurd it is that the serious matter of controlling immigration into this country has become almost entirely a partisan issue, with the Republicans and Democrats merely jockeying against each other rather than doing what is best for our country.
The vote to do the right thing in the Senate was 51-48, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voting “present.” This is what it has come to in our country: party over properness, with one dissent.
The Republican senators’ mock outrage over the swift disappearance of the trial was patent, election-year nonsense. They know as well as we do that the only other sitting cabinet member impeached in American history was the corrupt William Belknap, then the secretary of war, who was impeached in 1876, except that he resigned before the Senate could vote to declare him guilty.
Mayorkas was accused of no corruption. He is simply carrying out the immigration policies, imperfect though they may be, of the president he was sworn into serve.
Let’s never see this kind of impeachment circus in the Senate again.
But here’s what would be excellent for Americans to see: A House and a Senate working toward actual immigration reform, including permanent solutions to the impasse over DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in the form of a compromise that surely could be hammered out between congressional Democrats and Republicans if electeds of good will put their minds to it.
And it’s impossible not to note here that that’s precisely what Alejandro Mayorkas did during a seemingly successful four- months-long series of negotiations with members of both parties that led in February to a deal that included very stringent border security protections that the GOP had demanded.
After presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that he opposed the deal, the GOP support for it collapsed. Trump wants to campaign on the border issue. If the crisis at the border had instead been solved, he wouldn’t be able to do so.
Related Articles
John Phillips: Oakland International Airport of Anywhere but Oakland
Southern California representatives vote for warrantless surveillance, against the Fourth Amendment
In Los Angeles, the state of the city isn’t great
The government wants to play God. What does that mean for our freedoms?
Mindless or spineless: The unbearable lightness of being Elizabeth Warren
The lead Republican negotiator on the deal, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, said in February that a “prominent media personality” who is supportive of the Trump campaign told him “‘if you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you’ … They have been faithful to their promise and done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks.”
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who had been entirely supportive of the tough negotiations on the border bill and the end result that gave the Republican side what it wanted, abandoned it at the last minute after Trump’s announcement that he was against it.
What will it take for the legislative branch of the United States government to do its duty to create effective immigration laws and security at our southern border without caving to the wishes of the executive branch, whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat? The American people need to demand an answer to that question.