House Speaker's Future In Question, Cabinet Secretary Impeachment Enters Trial Stage

The 118th Congress continues to take steps into uncharted territory, or at least into territory that hasn't been navigated in a long, long time.

The first impeachment of a cabinet secretary in 150 years moved to the trial stage today, while the House Speaker's future took another turn.

Much has been said about the lack of productivity of this Congress, with the historically low number of bills passed by both chambers and signed into law. However, historians will be hard-pressed to make the claim that the 118th was low in the production of drama.

Tuesday provided more support for that case.

House impeachment managers made the ceremonial walk to the Senate Tuesday afternoon with two articles of impeachment against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas: failure to enforce federal immigration laws and breach of the public trust.

“Alejandro N. Mayorkas’s willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” read U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor, “has had a calamitous consequence for the nation.”

Just an hour earlier, Secretary Mayorkas was testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, which Green chairs, about DHS’s FY 2025 budget request.

 Oklahoma's Josh Brecheen sits on the committee and, during his five-minute period for questions, told Mayorkas he's heard that undocumented immigrants have been able to get Real ID-compliant driver licenses.

 "This undermines the totality of the system,” U.S. Rep. Brecheen (R-Okla.) said in an interview afterward, “and so he acted like he was unaware and he said he would follow up with me."

 Brecheen and others on the far right are also upset with Speaker Mike Johnson, over his decision to bring aid for Ukraine to the floor this week without attaching border legislation to it.

 "Look,” explained Brecheen, “I have a good relationship with Speaker Johnson, but I was saying to them, you’ve got to listen to what we’re saying about the border."

Johnson already faces a motion to vacate filed last month by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and today another hardliner in the conference, Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, called on Johnson to simply resign as Speaker.

"I am not resigning,” Johnson (R-La.) told reporters, “and it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs."

That’s what Democrats say Mayorkas has been doing, his job, and that impeaching him because they don’t like the Biden administration policy he’s following sets a terrible precedent.

"Every time there's a policy [dis]agreement in the House, they send it over here,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “It ties the Senate in knots to do an impeachment trial. That's absurd. That's an abuse of the process."

Still, Senators will be sworn in as jurors Wednesday afternoon; what happens after that is still unclear — perhaps a brief trial or Schumer could move to dismiss the articles without a trial.