In an effort to capitalize on the problem in an election year, Republicans have voted in favor of impeaching Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, on clearly political grounds pertaining to conditions at the southern border.

With Speaker Mike Johnson’s shaky Republican majority and strong Democratic resistance to impeaching Mayorkas—the first cabinet secretary to stand charges in almost 150 years—the evening roll call proved to be close.

The House impeached Mayorkas 214–213, an unprecedented rebuke.

A trio of Republican votes disregarded party lines. The impeachment of Mayorkas, according to Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher, Colorado’s Ken Buck, and California’s Tom McClintock, did not meet the constitutional requirements.

Statement of Biden

In a statement made public following the vote, Joe Biden stated The House Republicans’ flagrant act of unconstitutional partisanship, which singled out a respectable public servant in order to further their own small-time political ambitions, will not go down well in history.

Republicans’ accusations against Mayorkas, he said in an interview last weekend, were “baseless… and that’s why I’m really not distracted by them.”

My attention is on the Department of Homeland Security’s activities. The amazing job that 216,000 men and women in our department do on behalf of the American public inspires me every single day.

House Republicans want to impeach more Biden administration officials than just Mayorkas. The vice president Kamala Harris, the attorney general Merrick Garland, the FBI director Christopher Wray, and the defense secretary Lloyd Austin are among the many people that Republicans have filed legislation to impeach.

However, those endeavors are far from being realized, in contrast to Mayorkas’s circumstances.

Mayorkas, who did not show up to testify during the impeachment process, blamed Congress directly for the border problem, stating that they neglected to update immigration rules in the face of widespread migration.

According to Mayorkas, the situation at the Mexican border, where there are still a lot of unauthorized migrants, “certainly” constituted “a crisis.”

However, he asserted that the Biden administration was not accountable for a malfunctioning system. Furthermore, we’re making great progress inside that flawed system. Fundamentally, though, only Congress has the power to make things right.

Following Donald Trump’s declaration of his opposition to the immigration and border compromise, which had been negotiated in-depth with Democrats, Republicans in the Senate abandoned and killed it last week.

Homeland security spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement that House Republicans will be known by history for violating the constitution for political advantage rather than trying to address the grave problems at our border.

House Republicans have wasted months with this bogus, illegitimate impeachment while Secretary Mayorkas was working with a group of Republican and Democratic senators to craft bipartisan ideas to bolster border security and get the funding required for enforcement.

Mayorkas is accused in the first article of impeachment of allowing migrants into the United States who ought to have been detained. The second article charges Mayorkas of hindering congressional scrutiny of his department and claims he lied to Congress about whether the southern border was secure although he had previously declared in court that his agency had “operational control” over the border.

In a letter to the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee last month, Mayorkas stated that the issues with our dysfunctional and antiquated immigration system are nothing new. “We require a legislative way and only Congress have ability to provide the better solution.”

Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the speaker of the house, told reporters on Tuesday that he is not worried about creating a precedent by impeaching Mayorkas because this is a unique circumstance in American history.

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