House Republicans’ impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday was certainly warranted, but it’s a pretty hollow victory.
Mayorkas earned this badge of shame by overseeing a total breakdown of the border, refusing to follow immigration law and allowing millions of migrants into the US interior while repeatedly insisting the border was “secure.”
But it’s more symbolic than anything: Democrats will inevitably block any conviction in the Senate.
Nor would his conviction, and removal from office, change anything, because Mayorkas was doing what President Biden wanted (which is why it was the first impeachment of a Cabinet officer since 1876).
So what we have is a third impeachment by the House in five years, none of which stood a chance in the Senate.
Democrats took the first crucial step in defining impeachment down by rushing to impeach then-prez Donald Trump over that Ukraine phone call purely to satisfy a base furious that RussiaGate fizzled out, and treating even the second impeachment, over the Jan. 6 capitol riot, cavalierly.
Or, if you want to blame Republicans, you can point to the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton; the point is that we now risk making this the future of US politics.
A regular series of fundamentally dead-end Senate trials that achieve nothing beyond making Congress even more dysfunctional, whenever the party that controls the House is mad enough at the White House.
At least you can say that the House successfully passed something, given that the only change it has so far been able to accomplish is a roundabout of Speakers.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing: Even Congress should be better than that.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
