House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) delayed until Monday the impeachment trial of the first sitting Cabinet member in history, responding to the concern of some conservatives worried about launching a Senate trial on the same day the chamber is scheduled to depart for the week.
House impeachment managers were originally slated to deliver two articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday. The trial probably wouldn’t have started until Thursday afternoon after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addresses a joint session of Congress that morning. Now, the articles are likely to be transmitted on Monday, prompting the Senate to start a trial on Tuesday.
“To ensure the Senate has adequate time to perform its constitutional duty, the House will transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate next week,” said a spokesperson for Johnson. “There is no reason whatsoever for the Senate to abdicate its responsibility to hold an impeachment trial.”
The statement was released after Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) thanked Johnson during a news conference for shifting the start of the impeachment trial to the “beginning of a legislative week rather than toward the end.”
“We don’t want this to come over on the eve of the moment when members might be operating under the influence of jet fuel intoxication,” Lee explained.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who is expected to move to table or dismiss the articles — said Tuesday that regardless of the delay, Democrats will stick with their original plan. To dismiss or table the trial, a simple majority is required, meaning that Democrats, who hold a 51-49 majority, have little to no room for error. At least one Republican — Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — said he plans to vote against a full trial.
Schumer said the charges were “absurd” and did not rise to the standard of impeachment and suggested that he’d try to end the trial before it really begins. “We’re going to move forward and resolve this as quickly as possible. Once again, impeachment should never be used to settle policy disagreements.”
“We’re ready to go whenever they are,” Schumer told reporters. “We are sticking with our plan. We’re going to move this as expeditiously as possible.”
The impeachment articles had been expected to arrive at the Senate on the same day Mayorkas will be on the Hill to advocate for the DHS budget, where he is expected to request higher funding levels than in the deal agreed to last month by the White House and Congress to avoid a government shutdown. That deal carves out less funding than in the bipartisan border deal that collapsed in February, after Republicans scuttled the effort to fix the immigration system at the behest of former president and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
House Republicans would have delivered the articles to the Senate against the backdrop of testimony from a DHS chief who helped craft the bipartisan bill that would have allocated $20 billion in emergency funding for border security and immigration — and has previously lamented the agency as a “perennially financially starved” department.
The two impeachment articles charging Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and breach of the public trust have been hotly contested by Democrats, constitutional scholars and a smattering of GOP lawmakers who argue that the charges narrowly passed by House Republicans by a single vote earlier this year do not amount to high crimes and misdemeanors but rather to policy differences.
House Republicans have argued that Mayorkas — who has broad legal discretion in enforcing border laws — has violated provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which mandates the detention of any deportable migrant. They assert that a 2021 memo signed by Mayorkas ordering immigration officials to take a different approach to prioritizing who should be detained in the United States — given the limited detention facilities and the massive immigration court backlog — runs contrary to language of the law. Led by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, GOP lawmakers also charge that Mayorkas has acted outside of his authority to expand the number of humanitarian parole programs available to migrants. Those programs allow noncitizens to temporarily, and legally, live inside and work in the United States.
The House Republican impeachment managers, who are set to deliver the charges to the Senate after a ceremonial walk across the Capitol, include Green, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Michael McCaul (Tex.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), August Pfluger (Tex.), Ben Cline (Va.), Andrew R. Garbarino (N.Y.), Michael Guest (Miss.), Harriet Hageman (Wyo.), Clay Higgins (La.) and Laurel Lee (Fla.).
Senators must be sworn in as a group, by raising their right hand as Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) — chosen to chair the trial — reads aloud the oath swearing they will mete out “impartial justice” in the matter. Then, every senator must sign the oath book at the front of the chamber in groups of four. Democrats are considering quickly moving to dismiss or table the trial shortly after this process, a maneuver that would take 51 votes to pass.
“There may be attempts to delay it. But we’re hopeful we can resolve those delays and give this impeachment the dismissal it so richly deserves,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Efforts to prolong the trial, and potentially force Democrats to cast some hard votes, are now more likely to materialize without senators rushing to catch flights home.
Several Republicans on Tuesday argued that Democrats should not depart from precedent by skipping a trial and moving to dismiss the charges. They intend to at least try to influence the process by introducing procedural roadblocks such as raising points of order, which bar certain actions or considerations that violate Senate procedure and legislation. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said it was “incredibly dangerous” for Democrats not to fulfill what he called a “constitutional obligation” to have a trial.
“I intend to do everything I can to affect the process so that we do our jobs,” Schmitt added.
Some House Republicans were privately angry about Johnson’s decision to push back a trial that has languished since it passed the House after an initial embarrassing defeat in February when three GOP lawmakers voted against impeaching Mayorkas.
A host of conservative senators have previously poured cold water on the charges and viewed them as meritless, criticizing the use of what was designed to be a rarely used constitutional instrument as a weapon of partisan warfare. But most of them have resolved to vote against a motion to dismiss the trial.
“I think we’re dangerously close to using impeachment as kind of a vote of no confidence,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) conceded. “But on that one, I have no confidence in Mayorkas because we have a border situation that’s out of control,” he added, dodging the question of whether Mayorkas was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the lead Republican architect of the bipartisan border security deal, said Republicans needed to move forward with the trial strictly as a matter of observing historical precedent. Others described the trial as a politically useful opportunity for Republicans to attack Democrats on immigration, an issue voters overwhelmingly disapprove President Biden’s handling of. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) called the articles a “little bit odd” but recommended that Republicans “make the most of it.”
“The issue of the border is just such a wonderful one for us to talk about as Republicans,” said Cramer. “My personal belief on it — the House did it, so here we are now, we might as well make the most of it. … There’s no question that the details of things at the border right now, a few months from the election, are very good for Republicans.”
Romney is the only Republican who has said he will vote to dismiss the trial, stating that the border is “a disaster” but Mayorkas had not committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Another possible defector, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), declined to weigh in on stating her impartiality as a trial juror.
Democrats have castigated Republicans for what they’ve called a “sham” impeachment process, underscoring the hypocrisy of Republican demands of Mayorkas, while simultaneously denying him of additional resources. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a vulnerable Democrat facing reelection, left the door open to a trial if House Republicans included any border security policies in their articles of impeachment.
“The truth is that we had a chance to fix the border, to shut it down. And [Republicans] voted ‘no’ because they had a person who said we want to keep this a political issue, and that’s exactly what they continue to do with this,” Tester said of Republicans. “They can try to politicize this — and in fact, if it is a politicized document that we saw in the House, I will vote to discharge it and get it the hell out. If there are policy things in there that actually make sense, I’ll take a look at it and we’ll evaluate it from there.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who worked closely with Lankford to craft the bipartisan border deal, said that if anything, the impeachment trial could backfire when voters are reminded that Republicans blocked a border compromise they had demanded from Democrats.
“People are willing to believe that Republicans aren’t sincere when it comes to how much they talk about the border and how little they actually do fix the problem,” said Murphy. “And I think this impeachment debacle has the potential to backfire on them because for the first time in a long time, voters are starting to grapple with the fact that Republicans may be all smoke and no fire when it comes to actually trying to fix the problem with immigration.”
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