During a hearing this week of the House Judiciary Committee, ranking member Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) sharply criticized House Republicans’ push towards impeaching Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas during opening statements.
Mayorkas was appearing as a witness. In the course of his opening comments, Nadler blasted Republican rhetoric alleging that there has been an invasion over the southern border carried out by migrants, characterizing the rhetoric as directly behind incidents of violence like the mass shooting at a southern Texas Wal-Mart where nearly two dozen were killed in 2019. Afterwards, then-President Donald Trump and other leading Republicans declined to stop using the rhetoric alleging an invasion was unfolding at the border.
“The chairman and his colleagues in the majority will use today’s hearing as a predicate for a completely baseless attempt to impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” Nadler insisted. “They will do so at the behest of the most extreme MAGA Republicans. It will be one more exercise in political theater for the right-wing outrage machine before the August break. Sadly, the outrage will be entirely evidence-free… Republicans have not established any legitimate grounds to impeach Secretary Mayorkas. They have not uncovered evidence of wrongdoing or malfeasance of any kind. They have policy disagreements with the Secretary.”
And such disagreements, Nadler argued, are no basis for impeachment. The New York Democrat also pointed to enforcement actions that the Biden administration has taken and continues to take around the southern border, with deportations continuing and encounters generally down since the end of Title 42 restrictions that had covered crossings.
Republicans had raised preemptive outrage about the end of those restrictions, anticipating in their rhetoric a surge at the border that did not materialize. And yet, Republican commitment to the cause is continuing. At a recent hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republicans heard from witnesses who solemnly declared the U.S. to have already been overrun after that imagined invasion and who alleged the possibility that the spread of fentanyl in the U.S. was effectively a chemical weapons campaign by China because of ties that have been claimed to that country behind drug components.
Check out the hearing below:
