The Mayorkas Impeachment Is Just the Latest GOP Stunt

In another low parody of constitutional oversight, the House’s GOP majority has transformed the act of impeachment—envisioned by the nation’s founders as a critical proceeding to root out self-dealing corruption in high federal office—into a vibes-driven instrument of ideological retribution. In a narrow 214-213 vote on Tuesday evening, the House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for doing his job in a manner that the Republican conference doesn’t like. Mayorkas thus became the first sitting cabinet member to be impeached. (Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, was impeached on corruption charges in 1876, but after he’d already resigned.)

The two articles of impeachment filed against Mayorkas cited, without real evidence, his alleged “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and a similarly ill-specified breach of public trust. The slapdash character of the proceeding was right there in the ungrammatical attribution of a “systemic” trespass to a single human actor, as well as in the first stab at the Homeland Security secretary’s impeachment just a week ago, which failed to muster the majority required to see it through to passage. So congratulations, Mr. Speaker: You’ve won a purely symbolic show-trial indictment of a randomly designated political enemy in the bonus round.