If governing amid the chaos of migrants crossing the southern border is a criminal offense (it isn’t), then it is members of Congress, mostly Republicans, who deserve condemnation, not a Cabinet secretary.

They, along with the now-departed lawmakers of recent decades, are the ones responsible for our dysfunctional immigration system: Congress has consistently failed to provide immigration officials with sufficient funding and legal power to stem the increasing number of immigration outbreaks , to investigate and to process in an orderly manner. people longing for opportunity in the United States. The border problem is not new, it is just worse than ever.

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas told Senate Republican critics last year: Our asylum system is broken, our entire immigration system is broken, and it desperately needs reform. And that has been the case for years.

But instead of taking any responsibility and addressing the problem, Republicans in the House of Representatives are scapegoating Mayorkas for their own election year benefit and that of their lord and master, likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The full House is expected to vote next week on the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas that the Homeland Security Committee approved along party lines late Tuesday.

If enough so-called moderate Republicans agree, the resolution would go to the Democratic-controlled Senate

undoubtedly probably

To acquit Mayorkas because the accusations of dereliction of duty are false. Still, Republicans in the House of Representatives would be putting on a dog-and-pony show this year on an issue that has become a top priority for voters, especially their parties’ MAGA base.

Politics is stupid anyway, why focus on Mayorkas instead of his boss? Here’s the reason: because they don’t have the goods or the votes to impeach President Biden. South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said the quiet part out loud when he explained in November that his fellow Republicans should focus on what they can get. Mayorkas is easier than impeaching the President of the United States.

Republicans openly engaging in politics by removing a Cabinet secretary for the second time in American history is bad enough. Get the popcorn, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican, told party donors last April, adding: It’ll be fun.

What’s doubly devastating is that they’re impeaching Mayorkas even though they’re allying with Trump to kill a bipartisan bill that the Cabinet Secretary negotiated with senators from both parties that would be the toughest immigration bill ever, with additional billions for exactly what Republicans say they want: more border security.

Not since President Reagan signed a landmark immigration law in 1986

action

Has Congress been able to agree on policies to better control the migration waves, despite presidents of both parties trying hard to get new laws in place? signed and more funds approved. Republicans were doomed to compromise under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama.

Bush’s second-term Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, nodded to Congress’ sorry record when he came to Mayorka’s defense in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week. Despite insufficient resources, the Department of Homeland Security under Mayorkas has removed, returned or expelled more migrants by the end of 2023 than in any comparable period in the past decade, he wrote.

The truth is that our nation’s immigration system is outdated, and DHS leaders from both parties have done their best to manage our immigration system without adequate support from Congress…, Chertoff added. Republicans in the House of Representatives are dodging difficult policy work and hard-fought compromises.

Chertoff is also a former federal judge, adding weight to his charge that Republicans have failed to present evidence that meets the bar for impeaching Mayorkas under the Constitution’s high crimes and misdemeanors clause. In it, he echoed other conservative lawyers who know the difference between legal evidence and political nonsense, including Jonathan Turley, the Republicans and the constitutional authority of Fox News. Being bad at your job is not a criminal offense,

Turleyhe

Mayorkas said.

The Republicans’ resolution accusing the secretaries of deliberate and systematic failure to comply with the law and betraying the public trust is nothing more than mumbo-jumbo for what is really an everyday policy difference.

Mayorkas is implementing President Biden’s policies. That’s what a secretary will do, said Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the leading Republican in closed-door negotiations on a border bill. Until we change the law, we will get the same results.

Given their narrow majority in the House of Representatives, Republicans can only lose two votes on the impeachment resolution if the numbers fall within party lines, and several Republicans are undecided. Rep. Tom McClintock, one of many California Republicans running in swing districts, wrote to his constituents late last year that the authors of the Constitution explicitly rejected mismanagement, malfeasance and dereliction of duty as criminal offenses.

Mayorkas isn’t even guilty of mismanagement. An immigrant himself, he came to the U.S. as an infant when his parents fled Castro’s Cuba. He has lived the American dream and become the widely respected (except by partisans) leader

of the department responsible for immigration.

As Representative Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, noted during the impeachment debate in House committees, Congress has so underfunded border security that Mayorkas, like his predecessors, has had to use his discretion in deciding how many migrants he must hold, and which one. In the last two years of the Trump administration, Magaziner said, 52% of migrants apprehended at the southern border were released and not detained. I did not hear my Republican colleagues then try to impeach the secretary.

No they did not. And they shouldn’t be doing that now. Instead, they should act like legislators and make laws: solving problems, and not campaigning against them when they get worse.

@jackiekcalmes