Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will block the impeachment trial of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for fear it will prevent President Joe Biden’s re-election and cause Democrats to lose control of the Senate, GOP lawmakers said on March 9 in a fiery news conference.
“This issue is so toxic to Senate Democrats, to House Democrats, and to Joe Biden that they do not want this to be the issue of the day,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said in the opening statement of the conference.
“Tabling these impeachment articles is a nuclear option and it will necessitate some kind of nuclear retaliation much as when Harry Reid went nuclear in 2013 to get [President Barack Obama’s] federal judge nominees moving forward,” he said.
Mr. Marshall was referring to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) leading Senate Democrats to all but kill the filibuster in confirming presidential judicial appointments. Mr. Reid’s actions would strengthen President Donald Trump’s ability to gain Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017.
“I think it’s significant that it would only take two Democrats to deny the tabling of this process and the order to proceed to an impeachment trial, but we certainly don’t think that’s going to be the case,” Mr. Marshall added.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said “we all know that Sen. Schumer is playing politics with this. He has members who are very likely going to lose their Senate seats and he does not want them to have to take a vote on this. He also knows that the border and the lack of border security is the No. 1 issue with the American people.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) then declared that “a charitable interpretation of what Sen. Schumer plans to do does not exist. He is either going to make a motion to table or to dismiss the work done by the U.S. House of Representatives ... I fully expect Sen. Schumer to try to muddy up the water to try to make it look deep, but this is really very simple.
“We’re either going to follow Senate customs, Senate rules, and Senate history or we are not, and if he chooses—and he may have the votes to do it—to dismiss these impeachment articles without so much as a trial, as if it was just spam in the Democrats’ inbox ... and not even hold a trial because he thinks he has the votes and it’s politically expedient? Isn’t that special.”
Mr. Kennedy told the journalists present that “if Republicans were doing this, you would be catatonic and foaming at the mouth.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told reporters that “what the Democrats are nuking here is not just a Senate precedent or a Senate rule, but a provision of the Constitution and a time-honored duty in the U.S. Senate.
“Anyone who fancies himself or herself an institutionalist, someone concerned about the Senate as an institution, should for that reason alone be willing to stand up to this form of legislative tyranny and say we’ve got an obligation to do this.”
Mr. Lee further observed that a trial could either acquit or convict, “which begs the question, why don’t they want to hold this trial?”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) noted that when Mr. Mayorkas most recently testified before the Senate, he asked the secretary how many illegal immigrants had died while attempting to cross into the United States.
“He said ‘I don’t know.’ Of course he didn’t. The number is 853 but this administration doesn’t care about the body bags that their open borders are producing,” Mr. Cruz said. “When Joe Biden stood before Congress in his State of the Union address, he had planned not to say a word about the beautiful 21-year-old nursing student in Georgia murdered by an illegal alien Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas released into this country.”
The Texas Republican went through a lengthy list of other Americans killed in recent months across the country by illegal immigrants, including the 15-year-old disabled girl in Boston, Massachusetts who was violently raped by “an illegal Haitian immigrant Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas flew into this country.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to a request from Senate Republicans to delay the official informing of the Senate of the House passage of two counts of impeachment against Mr. Mayorkas from April 10 to April 15 at the earliest.
The Republicans sought the extra time in order to have a greater opportunity to make their case for moving forward with the impeachment trial. Whenever the trial is convened, they plan to introduce multiple points of order against a motion to dismiss the proceedings. If only one of the points of order is approved by a simple majority of the senators present for the trial, the process must move forward.
Senate rules require that once those counts are received by the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms and read aloud in the Senate chamber, senators must convene to be sworn-in as jurors and to agree on procedural matters, then begin hearing evidence from the 11 House impeachment managers and an equal number of Mayorkas defenders.
Mr. Schumer could not be reached for comment.
