Miscellaneous Political Stuff - Part 18…

Really great summary of the Republicans blowing up the border deal and refusing to fund border security and aid to Ukraine and Israel. There is a slim possibility that Republicans might eventually get their act together and pass funding for Ukraine, but they’ve already delayed 4 months. They’re clearly pandering to Trump who has made his preference for Putin and Russia clear.

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-30-2024

Today, according to Clare Foran, Manu Raju, and Morgan Rimmer of CNN, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told his Republican colleagues that he will not bring forward the bipartisan immigration bill senators have been working on for months, calling it “absolutely dead.”

Although Johnson insisted in November that border security was so crucial that he wouldn’t bring up aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza until such legislation was attached to it, Trump has made it clear he wants immigration and border security left on the table for him to use as an issue in his run for the presidency.

Instead of addressing border security through legislation, House Republicans instead are moving forward with their plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They wrote articles of impeachment even before holding hearings. Today, members of the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing to mark up those articles, which claim that Mayorkas committed high crimes and misdemeanors because he allegedly breached the public trust and refused to enforce immigration law.

In all our history, only one cabinet officer has been impeached. William Belknap, whose eight years as secretary of war under President U. S. Grant had been marked by ostentatious displays of wealth and apparent kickbacks from army contracts, was charged with corruption in March 1876 just hours after he tearfully handed Grant his resignation.


Almost 150 years later, the impeachment of Mayorkas would be the second effort to impeach a cabinet member. Yet there is no suggestion that Mayorkas has done anything but try to implement the law, even as the administration has repeatedly asked for more funding to make it possible for him to do his job.

In the hearing today, Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) noted that “across the system, we are at and above capacity, and so, what should the secretary do? The secretary, because he has not received the funding to provide adequate detention capacity, has to use his judgment for who to detain and who to release. That is not illegal. It is certainly not impeachable. And it is the exact same kind of discretion that every other director before him has used. In the last two years of the Trump administration, 52% of migrants apprehended at the southern border were released, not detained…. Nearly a million people. I did not hear my Republican colleagues trying to impeach the secretary or acting secretary under the Trump administration during those years. But here they are, trying to impeach Secretary Mayorkas for doing the exact same thing.”

Rather than passing the laws the country needs, the extremist Republicans appear to be determined to tee up an issue on which Trump can run for president in 2024. House speaker Johnson has demanded “ZERO” illegal crossings into the U.S., but this is a standard that no previous homeland security secretary has met because it is impossible to wall off every single means of entering this country by water, air, or land. And—despite Republicans’ false claims that Biden has established “open borders”—immigrants were more likely to be released into the country during Trump's term than during Biden’s.

What is going on here is an attempt of the extremist Republicans to undercut the administration by attacking a key cabinet officer not for actual misbehavior but on policy grounds.

There is no chance the Senate, dominated by Democrats, will convict Mayorkas even if the House, with its razor-thin Republican majority, impeaches him, but the extremist minority in the House that is going after him is attempting to set a precedent that a minority can stop the government from functioning.

The cost of that obstruction has been clear in domestic politics over government funding, but it has now become a global issue over the question of U.S. support for Ukraine.

The Republicans just do not care about the truth!!

He says it so very calmly lying through his teeth....

Putin's buddy who chose to spend July 4th in Russia with Putin!!

Not false.
Just one recent instance:
A terrorist from a terrorist group loyal to al-Qaeda was caught at the border, released INTO the country and allowed to exist in our country for almost a year.




"Many within the Biden administration, including Homeland Secretary Mayorkas, have repeatedly assured us that the vetting process at the border is comprehensive and complete. However, we continue to witness alarming instanceS where terrorists are able to freely roam the United States for months after being released at the border before their criminal and terrorist histories come to light … his situation is greatly endangering our nation, and it is clear that our safety is dependent on enforcing our immigration laws and securing the border.
The overburdening of the Border Patrol with the excessive amounts of illegal border crossers has forced faster processing times, which doesn’t allow for a more vigorous initial investigation into a migrant’s background. The background checks currently being run only initially search out criminal history in the United States, not outside its borders. It could take days, weeks, or months to connect derogatory information coming from other databases."
-retired ICE field director John Fabbricatore

Then, it will come as a complete surprise to him when they garnish his bank accounts? LOL

Not surprisingly, Republican accusations against Secretary Mayorkas are false and inaccurate, ignore the realities and falsely pretend that immigration was perfect under Trump. The Republican impeachment attempt of Secretary Mayorkas is a farce, a distraction and political theater.

www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/us/politics/impeachment-mayorkas-immigration.html

The G.O.P. was plowing forward without producing evidence that Mr. Mayorkas committed a crime or acts of corruption, arguing instead that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed.

Democrats counter that the Biden administration has grappled with record-setting waves of migrants to the best of its ability, given the limited resources that Congress has been willing to devote to addressing the challenges.

“Neither of the impeachment charges the committee will consider today are a high crime or misdemeanor,” said Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s most senior Democrat. He added that House Republicans “don’t want progress. They don’t want solutions. They want a political issue.”

“I’m a ‘lean no’ at this point,” Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he feared that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would damage Congress institutionally and be “moving in the wrong direction.”

“To say that someone was incompetent — we wouldn’t have anybody in Congress, if the standard was competence,” Mr. Buck added.

In a letter to the panel on Tuesday, the secretary, whom Republicans did not allow to testify publicly in his own defense after scheduling disputes, forcefully contested the charges.

“You claim that we have failed to enforce our immigration laws,” Mr. Mayorkas wrote. “That is false.” He said Republicans’ allegation that he obstructed their inquiries was “baseless and inaccurate.”

What the charges do not take into account, however, is that Mr. Mayorkas also has the legal authority to determine which migrants to prioritize for detention, given limited bed space and long backlogs in the immigration courts.

“Congress loves passing laws that are impossible to execute,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, adding that enforcing detention mandates is often “a question of resources.”

The United States has not had enough detention beds to accommodate the number of migrants awaiting removal proceedings for several years, well before President Biden took office. Even the Trump administration released migrants into the country, because the maximum detention capacity — about 55,000 in 2019 — was not enough to accommodate the number of arrivals seeking entry. Mr. Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy requiring some migrants to wait for their immigration court dates outside the United States, which Republicans want to reinstitute, did not apply to all migrants making claims at the border.

Parole powers allow migrants to live and work temporarily in the United States.

One of the impeachment articles says Mr. Mayorkas “paroled aliens en masse in order to release them from mandatory detention,” again with the intent of undermining the law.

But the immigration act gives the executive branch parole power to let migrants temporarily live and work in the United States for humanitarian reasons, or if their admission would be to the public’s benefit. Decisions about whom to parole are to be made on a case-by-case basis, and there is no restriction as to what criteria the secretary can consider when determining who qualifies. There is also no statutory cap on how many migrants can be allowed into the country under the authority.

Several past administrations, including those of former Presidents Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have relied on parole authority to bring members of certain vulnerable migrant groups into the United States.

The Biden administration has built on pre-existing programs allowing nationals of certain economically ravaged Central and South American countries with sponsors already in the United States to seek parole. It has also inaugurated similar pathways for Afghans and Ukrainians fleeing war, and introduced a mobile app known as C.B.P. One to streamline migrants through ports of entry.

House Republicans have sought to close down those avenues, passing legislation last year that would shutter nearly all of them.Democrats are solidly opposed to the Republican drive to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, which they call a political stunt that turns a constitutional process on its head. If Mr. Mayorkas is impeached, the Democratic-led Senate is all but certain to acquit him in a trial that would require a two-thirds majority to convict and remove him from office.

Looking at the historical context, only 1 Cabinet secretary has ever been impeached. The Republican attempt to impeach Secretary Mayorkas lacks evidence and is an overreach.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/29/mayorkas-impeachment-immigration-border-republicans/

The articles of impeachment filed against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas make a mockery of the solemn congressional power to remove officials for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“The foundational requirement for impeachable ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is that they must be of extraordinary seriousness and ought to be of a type that corrupts or subverts governmental processes or the constitutional order,” one of the nation’s leading experts on impeachment, University of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman, told the panel as it hurtled toward writing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. “Following the policy directives of one’s elected superior in pursuit of that superior’s policy aims is simply not an impeachable abuse of power.”

House Republicans have produced no conservative impeachment scholars to defend their actions. Their go-to legal expert, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has said he sees no impeachable offense here. “Absent some new evidence, I cannot see the limiting principle that would allow the House to impeach Mayorkas without potentially making any policy disagreement with a cabinet member a high crime and misdemeanor,” Turley wrote in the Daily Beast. “That is a slippery slope that we would be wise to avoid.”

In the draft impeachment articles released on Sunday, Mayorkas is accused of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” The evidence for the first amounts to a grab bag of complaints about the Biden administration’s immigration policies, including that it failed to comply with mandates to detain migrants and that it expanded “parole” programs for migrants from various countries.

No matter that, as George W. Bush homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal, under Mayorkas, “the majority of migrants encountered at the Southwest border have been removed, returned or expelled.”
No matter that no administration, Democrat or Republican, can possibly comply with the technical requirement to detain every individual who crosses the border illegally; Congress has never provided the funding for that. As Homeland Security pointed out in a memo, “A standard requiring 100% detention would mean that Congress should have impeached every DHS secretary since the Department was founded.”

No matter that prior administrations, including Donald Trump’s, have used “parole” to admit citizens from various countries.

The evidence for the second charge — breach of public trust — is even thinner: that Mayorkas “knowingly made false statements, and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight of the Department of Homeland Security … principally to obfuscate the results of his willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” Obstructed lawful oversight? Mayorkas has testified before Congress 27 times in 35 months, more than any other Biden Cabinet official.

Which brings me to a final, more personal tragedy: the toll these proceedings take on someone who has spent the bulk of his career serving his country. I happen to know Mayorkas, a Cuban-born immigrant whose mother escaped the Holocaust and whose family fled Cuba after the Castro revolution. He is as decent, thoughtful and committed a public servant as I have encountered. But don’t take it from me. Listen to his Republican predecessor, Chertoff, who described Mayorkas as “fair and honest — dedicated to the safety and security” of the United States.

If House Republicans get their way, if the impeachment power is so corrupted, who will be willing to subject themselves to this sort of abuse? It is one thing to know as an intellectual matter that impeachment is unwarranted and conviction will not be forthcoming. But to become a footnote in the history books, a second entry after the corrupt Belknap, is an injury that no one who has worked so hard for his country should be forced to endure.

Reminds me of the time Chuck Schumer claimed he had irrefutable proof of Russian collusion. 🤔
Makes it easy to proclaim that when you created the scandal yourself. Complete with altered evidence and all.

Funny how the only one that got arrested and went to prison for actual Russian collusion was on the side going after Trump for Russian collusion. Top FBI official Charles McGonical

As aj2hall posted..

There was more ..

U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) blasted his GOP colleagues for their unwavering devotion to Donald Trump while ignoring their critical national security oversight responsibilities during the House Republicans’ Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday.

“We have held zero – I repeat – zero full committee hearings dedicated to emergency preparedness, cyber threat, infrastructure protection, transportation security, Department of Homeland Security management or information sharing and intelligence efforts,” Menendez the son of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) declared.

"With the global dynamic that we have, we have not lived up to our oversight obligation here on this committee because you all are obsessed with the border, because you bend the knee to the ‘Orange Jesus,’ as you refer to him across the aisle.”

“That’s what this is about,” the freshman congressman shouted angrily. “And we have failed, failed, our jurisdiction on this committee, so I’m tired of being lectured."

“You know, I try to listen here. I try to be a team player. I really do. I try not to engage in the partisanship, but I’ve had it. I’ve listened to a lot of accusations here today. We are here on a sham impeachment hearing, because the partisanship of this committee, and enough is enough. Ms. (Marjorie Taylor) Greene asked the American people, the American people are listening. They are and they’re tired of the partisanship of this Republican majority that has failed to get things done.”

The GOP-led hearing lasted past midnight....

www.rawstory.com/you-bend-the-knee-to-the-orange-jesus-dem-launches-f-house-republicans-in-fiery-takedo/