If the House follows the committee’s recommendation this week and impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, it would be the first time in American history that a sitting Cabinet official is impeached. But Mr. Mayorkas is not that lonely.
Republicans have also filed articles of impeachment against his boss, President Biden, as well as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director. They threatened them against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
In fact, the threat of impeachment has become a favorite Republican pastime after former President Donald J. Trump urged his allies to seek revenge for his own two impeachment trials during his term. The chances that Mr. Mayorkas, let alone Mr. Biden, will ever be convicted in the Senate without a shocking revelation appear to be almost zero, and the others do not even appear to be in serious danger of being formally impeached by the House become.
But impeachment, once considered perhaps the most serious fight against corruption and abuse of power and pioneered by the Founding Fathers, now risks becoming a dead letter to the Constitution, just another weapon in today’s bitter partisan wars. Mr. Trump’s two acquittals have made clear that a president can be assured of remaining in office, no matter how serious his misdeeds, as long as his party sticks with him, and the Biden-era impeachment effort for a serious crime was written off as just more politics.
“Impeachment has become more of a political and public relations tool than a serious executive branch accountability mechanism,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. “It is consistent with the deterioration of norms in Washington institutions and the ever-increasing weaponization of legal tools to harm political opponents.”
The current impeachment effort in the House has angered the Biden team and certainly Mr. Mayorkas, who issued a defiant seven-page letter before the House Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to impeach him this week. But while impeachment preoccupied the White House under Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton and Mr. Trump, it is hardly an afterthought in the Biden West Wing.
Not a single Democrat has expressed support for impeaching Mr. Biden or his advisers, unlike previous impeachments when at least a handful of the incumbent’s party members were open to it. On the contrary, several Republicans have mocked their party’s eagerness for impeachment. Whatever his son Hunter did, there is no evidence that Mr. Biden did anything wrong, and Mayorka’s impeachment is about a political dispute, not a criminal allegation.
That won’t change if Mr. Trump beats Mr. Biden this fall and returns to office. It’s hard to imagine that impeachment will serve as a check on any excesses in a second Trump presidency – Mr. Trump would already be the only president ever to be impeached (and acquitted) twice, and would be seriously worried about a third time to be accused?
It is remarkable how quickly impeachment was pushed back as a serious constitutional tool to rein in a rogue government.
When drafting the Constitution, the framers chose to include an impeachment clause to prevent the despotism that Americans had just freed themselves from in the Revolution. First, they decided that presidents and other officials could be impeached with a majority in the House of Representatives and convicted of “treason or bribery” with a two-thirds majority in the Senate.
George Mason thought this was too limited and suggested adding “maladministration” as a punishable offense, i.e. incompetence. But James Madison objected, finding it too broad and arguing that it would subject the president to the whims of the Senate. Mason backed down, but then suggested “or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as an alternative.
It was elegant, but the designers didn’t really define it. Alexander Hamilton made it clear that the term meant crimes that “concern principally injuries directly inflicted upon society itself” – in other words, not every ancient crime would be punishable, but only those which constituted an offense against the people or represented the system.
It should be rare and it was for decades. Only 21 times has the House voted to impeach a government official, and only eight times has the Senate convicted and removed them from office, all judges who otherwise served life terms. The only other Cabinet official impeached, William Belknap, the corrupt Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant, resigned in tears just minutes before the House took up his case in 1876, but lawmakers voted anyway for accusing him.
It was so rare that no president was impeached until President Andrew Johnson was one vote away from being convicted in the Senate in 1868. It took another 130 years before there was another impeachment of the president, namely Mr. Clinton, who was also acquitted, and only 21 years passed between the second and third impeachment of Mr. Trump.
Just over a year passed between the third and fourth, when Mr. Trump was impeached a second time. If the House of Representatives impeaches Mr Biden, there will have been three articles of impeachment against the president in five years – more than in the previous 230 years of the republic combined.
But at least until recently, impeachment also served as a useful deterrent. At least seven other presidents have been impeached at some point without success. Some, such as George HW Bush and Barack Obama, have described considering the risk of impeachment before taking actions that could exceed the limits of their power.
Philip Bobbitt, a longtime Columbia Law School professor who published an updated version of Charles L. Black’s classic “Impeachment: A Handbook” in 2018, agreed that impeachment has been devalued but argued that it can still serve its purpose .
“It’s still in the holster,” he said. “Yes, it has been degraded by this poll-driven way of raising money, but it is not inconceivable that there is a president who will actually do something that is in the middle of the law. It is not enough to say that the impeachment process has now changed to the point where it is just another instrument of character assassination. It’s that. But it’s not just that.”
Michael J. Gerhardt, an impeachment scholar at the University of North Carolina, said Republicans were using impeachment not for accountability but to cause political damage. “The efforts to impeach President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas are clearly attempts to make impeachment just another weapon in the partisan war in Washington,” he said.
“Yet the impeachment still hurts,” he added. Impeachment will still be a useful constitutional tool because presidents perceive impeachment as scarlet, Mr. Gerhardt said, citing Messrs. Clinton and Trump. “Presidents care about their legacies, and impeachment proceedings weigh on them forever.”
Indeed, it is this sting that may be driving Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to impeach Mr. Biden and his team in revenge for his own impeachments. “They did it to me,” he said in a radio interview last fall. “If they hadn’t done it to me,” he added, “perhaps they wouldn’t have done it to them.”
The proliferation of articles of impeachment covers a range of alleged crimes, but as in Mr. Mayorkas’ case, they are largely driven by Republican criticism of the way officials do their jobs. In Mr. Mayorkas’ case, Republicans accuse him of releasing illegal immigrants pending court dates rather than detaining them, but Congress has not provided enough detention facilities to actually hold all the migrants coming across the border.
Arguing that Mr. Mayorkas is not following the law, Republicans have cast his mistakes as a serious crime, a claim that even some fellow Republicans have rejected, including Michael Chertoff, a Homeland Security secretary under the second President Bush. In fact, this logic is more similar to a parliamentary system in which legislators can vote no confidence in a minister.
Mr. Biden’s team has mocked Republicans for their appetite for impeachment. In a statement released this week, the White House cheekily asked, “Is there anyone Republicans in the House would not impeach?”
David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics, added his own suggestion. Noting Republicans’ uproar over the possibility of a famous singer endorsing Mr. Biden, he joked that the “countdown” had begun “to the impeachment of Taylor Swift by House Republicans.”
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2024-02-01 23:34:54
www.nytimes.com
