The NPR Politics Podcast - Is Impeachment The Answer?

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

House Republicans in disagreement with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas's handling of the southern border want to impeach him. The move to impeach a cabinet secretary over a policy issue is historic and an example of Congress's changing 'rules.' This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving.This podcast was produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Katie in Alexandria, Virginia, and I'm here hanging out with my baby who just got his four-month shot. He's not very happy about it. This podcast was recorded at 1.05 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday, January 31st, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully we'll all be in a better mood. Here's the show. Aw, hopefully he'll take a nap, too. We'll all be in a better mood. Here's the show. Aw. Hopefully he'll take a nap, too. Way to stay healthy, though.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. Impeachment has often been a political tool. But now House Republicans are using it in a new way, taking aim at a Biden administration official who's responsible for border security, which is an issue they want to be front and center in the 2024 campaign. They're trying to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer. The time for accountability is now. That is Tennessee Congressman Mark Green, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the House. So Deirdre, first of all, what are Republicans accusing Mayorkas of? How did this all get started? Well, they released an impeachment resolution that charges Secretary Mayorkas with two articles of impeachment. One is willfully ignoring the law. Two is breach of trust. It was an all-day hearing where they went back and forth over a lot of political trash talk. They approved that resolution on a party line, and now it heads to the House floor, where I should say House Speaker Mike Johnson has a very slim majority, and there still are a couple of House Republicans who have not

committed to impeaching Mayorkas. So we're keeping an eye on that. But it's very likely that the House could pass this in a party line vote and send it to the Senate, where there would be a trial. But again, Mayorkas is unlikely to be convicted and removed by the Democratic Senate. But I mean, this really started when House Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections. The Republican base immediately pushed for impeachment of multiple Biden administration officials, Secretary Mayorkas, Attorney General Garland, and of course, President Biden. Of course, we hear impeachment, we often think of presidential impeachment efforts. But Ron, has this ever happened before,

targeting a cabinet member over an issue like this? Sure, sure. 1876. Guy's name was William Belknap, and he was pretty utterly corrupt. He was the Secretary of War in 1876, and he was selling the right to sell various and sundry kinds of materials on military installations, military posts. Very lucrative business, apparently. And he'd already been driven to resign, but there was a big debate over whether or not that was good enough. The House wanted to make sure that they kicked him on his way out the door so that they had kicked him out the door. And his resignation was debated, but they decided it wasn't really a bar to impeaching him. So they did. But that's the last time that the House has impeached a cabinet secretary. Mostly impeachment

has been used, of course, famously for a few presidents, all of whom were acquitted in the Senate. There might have been something different for Richard Nixon, but he resigned before he could actually be impeached by the House. And then there have been a number of federal judges who have been accused of corruption, and eight of them have actually been removed. That's the total history of it back to the beginning of the republic.

And Ron, what are the kinds of crimes that are considered impeachable offenses? Constitution's a little bit vague on this. It says high crimes, and then it says misdemeanors. So we have had endless arguments over the years about what was a misdemeanor in 1787 and what we think of as a misdemeanor in 1787 and what we think of as a misdemeanor today, which is to say a minor crime. High crime and minor crime don't seem to belong in the same thought, but that's what we have from the Constitution. So that has been greatly debated, certainly in the Clinton case, because that was largely about an affair he had with a White House intern. So they focused on the misleading testimony he had given to a grand jury about that affair. So, you know, there was a lot

of back and forth about what was a high crime in that instance as well. And that has been true in the case of a number of the judges who have been impeached and then tried and acquitted in the Senate. As Deirdre mentioned, Republicans have also tried to bring impeachment proceedings against President Biden. Why is Mayorkas the target and why now? You have to say that the historical lesson is that impeachment bounces back. And the experience that Congress had, particularly in impeaching Bill Clinton back in 1998. They were in the process of impeaching him when they had a midterm election. The Republicans were expecting to pick up 20, 25 seats.

Instead, they lost seats, and it was widely attributed to the unpopularity of the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Now, they went ahead and did it anyway, and then he was acquitted in the Senate, as everyone knew he would be. And that really resulted in some of the best months of Bill Clinton's presidency, because he just went up and up and up in the polls, up over 60%. Imagine that. And so that memory is still present for a lot of Republicans. Also, it didn't seem to do the Democrats much good to impeach Donald Trump, at least not the first time, and didn't seem to do the Democrats much good to impeach Donald Trump, at least not the first time, and didn't seem to do them much good at all. And eventually he was not reelected, and it's really becoming a top tier issue in the campaign for both the House and the Senate in 2024. The House speaker has made it clear it's his top priority. about this impeachment 150 years ago, I mean, Democrats pointed out over many hours that the Mayorkas charges aren't really about any sort of criminal issue. It's really about a policy difference. And no administration official has ever been impeached over a difference in policy.

And really, if you want to go after the Biden administration for not, if you don't agree with their immigration policy, that's what an election is for. That's what a piece of legislation is for. And we heard that at the very top and throughout the hearing yesterday, most notably from the top Democrat on the panel, Benny Thompson of Mississippi. They don't want progress. They don't want solutions. They want a political issue. And most of all, they want to please their disgraced former president. House Republicans take their marching orders from Donald Trump. Just to say that Mayorkas is not exactly what you'd call a household name in America, but he does have responsibility as Secretary of Homeland Security for the border.

Now, you've got people coming from all directions. Michael Chertoff, who was the Homeland Security director under George W. Bush, to say, look, this guy is just enforcing what Congress passes as the law. He's just doing what he's supposed to do. And everybody can see that this is just a political maneuver. Michael Cherto rid of Mayorkas, but President Biden is still going to be the president. So I think a lot of them think that this is sort of a waste of time. If it ends up coming to the Senate, it obviously is in their court, but they know it's not going anywhere. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. And we're back. You know, Deirdre, we talk a lot about dysfunction in Congress, Congress's inability to get things done.

A constant theme. Yes. How did these impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas affect the ability of Congress to move legislation? I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's political messaging effort. House Republicans are responding to the Republican base who really wants them to do this. House Republicans are having a really hard time passing basic bills, right, to avoid a shutdown, to dodge a possible default. There are some examples. The House is voting today on a bipartisan tax bill that includes a modified child tax credit, similar to the one that a lot of families credit as helping them during the COVID era and could significantly impact a lot of families,

especially low income families. But overall, I mean, I think this sort of adds to the election year theater of everyone knows this isn't going anywhere in a Democratic Senate, where it becomes a privilege resolution, meaning the Senate has to set aside other business and launch a trial of Secretary Mayorkas. So it does impact the Senate's agenda in terms of their efforts to pass a bipartisan border bill, which deals with a lot of the issues that Republicans argue is in the middle of a border crisis right now. Democrats kept arguing over and over again yesterday that that should be the focus, right? Like they weren't defending the president's record on the border, but they were saying we all care about it and we should work together on a solution as opposed to scapegoating the top administration official who's trying to enforce the law the best that he can.

So we've said this is likely not going anywhere in reality if it were to get to the Senate. But what are the larger implications of this impeachment process? I mean, does this set any kind of precedent for the future? It depends on how it sorts out. I suspect that if this is as much of a dud in the Senate as it appears it will be – and by the way, in the Senate, you need two-thirds to convict. The Republicans don't even have a majority. And they couldn't get it done with Bill Clinton when they did. So this is simply not going anywhere at all and will be dealt with as expeditiously as the Senate possibly can.

That will be something, I think, of an embarrassment for the House, maybe not as much as if they couldn't actually pass it. But I suspect that Deirdre is right and that actually Mike Johnson will be able to get it over the wall and send it to the Senate. And then it will be some kind of a distraction, but mostly a dud. So does this become in the future a kind of touchstone where people can say, oh, well, you're going to pull a Mayorkas on this, and that's no substitute for actually making policy. That's possible. Or I suppose it could become a precedent for an unhappy House

to pick on a cabinet secretary anytime it's unhappy on any issue, and this could just become another feature in the weaponization of congressional procedure. Ron, I do agree with you on that. I think that we've seen the weaponization of procedure and the weaponization of different tools under this House Republican majority over the last year or so, right? I mean, people get unhappy about what a lawmaker says on the other sides of the aisle. They go to the floor and they try to pass a censure resolution, right? This is just political differences, right? But they're trying to use the rules to sort of attack

back and forth. And I do think it's possible, right? There are other Biden administration officials who they're not happy with. The Attorney General Merrick Garland is one that comes up over and over again. They could decide they want to impeach him. House Republicans right now have not provided any evidence that President Biden benefited financially at all from his son Hunter Biden's business dealings, which is the center of their impeachment inquiry against President Biden now. So as that investigation is sort of in this period where they don't have much to move any sort of evidence based impeachment, they could just sort of go through more of these more sort of lower tier political attacks that, you know, aren't really moving the ball forward, but are showing their base that they're paying attention to their criticism of top Biden administration officials. You know, and I have one more question about the politics of that. I mean,

it sounds like red meat for the Republican base. Potentially, it's something we've said that Republicans want to make an issue in the 2024 campaign. We've certainly heard former President Trump talking about it. What about congressional races, Deirdre? I mean, is this something that members of Congress can run on, can take back home? I mean, I think in solid red districts, this is an issue where safe Republicans go home and say, we listened to you, we did what you wanted to the base. I think for those swing district Republicans, there is a risk that this issue, especially since it's not going anywhere in the Senate, trips up their

ability to say, hey, House Republicans can govern. Look what we got done. On the flip side, the border issue is a very real political weak spot for President Biden and for Democrats in the 2024 campaign. So a lot of independent voters aren't happy with what's happening. And we're seeing sort of the fallout in places around the country, cities like Denver, cities like Chicago and New York, where people are seeing around those regions, suburban districts that are a lot of the swing districts for the House, at least, that this could be an issue that puts some Democrats on the defense. Certainly something I heard about a lot, you know, for example, in New Hampshire, far away from the U.S.-Mexico border when I was talking to Republicans there. So an issue that is clearly not going away. We're going to leave it there. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.