“Actually, I have not read the articles of impeachment,” Mr. Mayorkas said during an exchange with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).
“Well, I’d probably want to do that because it alleges that you did not follow the law of the United States of America, and either you or your counsel ought to read that to make sure you are following the law,” Mr. Romney replied.
The secretary simply shook his head and shrugged.
The exchange came during a fiery hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, during which Mr. Mayorkas was grilled over the impact of his border policies.
The articles, which the House passed in February, accused Mr. Mayorkas of willfully refusing to enforce existing immigration laws and breach of public trust. They were delivered to the Senate earlier this week, but the trial was over before it even began.
The next day, less than three hours after the jurors were sworn in, the Senate voted along party lines to dismiss the two articles, which Democrats said fell short of the constitutional standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The rejection came before any evidence had been presented in the trial.
“History will not judge this moment well,” a frustrated Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after the votes.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed that the dismissal “proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment.” But Republicans say the move was political.
“Senate Democrats are too afraid to face the facts about what three years of Biden’s open borders have done to America,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an X post after the vote.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) echoed that opinion during Thursday’s hearing.
Mr. Schumer, he charged, denied the trial either out of “pure political interest” to shield vulnerable Democrats from the border issue or because he was “terrified of exposing your failures to the degree that an acquittal would be extremely painful for Democrats to explain to the American public.”
Mr. Scott added that he was “surprised” by Mr. Mayorkas’s admission that he hadn’t read the impeachment articles but was nonetheless sure that the former prosecutor could have presented a case in his own defense.
“But you didn’t get that chance, and Senate Democrats are setting a new precedent. They’re destroying the rules and tradition of the Senate to keep you quiet,” he continued.
“Do you think you’re being silenced because Democrats are terrified of your record and unable to defend you or because they don’t trust you?”
The secretary replied that he believed neither.
Mr. Mayorkas is the first sitting Cabinet secretary in U.S. history to be impeached. President Ulysses Grant’s fourth Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, was also impeached, though he resigned immediately before the House’s vote.
