Several Republicans in the House of Representatives are calling for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to be impeached, but House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said the whole Republican conference will have to decide together on whether to proceed against the Biden appointee.
“I think [impeachment is] a decision we’ll make as Republicans on the committee and as a conference,” Jordan told NTD on Thursday.
In January, Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) introduced a resolution to begin the impeachment process. In the first impeachment article, Fallon argued that Mayorkas had illegally implemented catch-and-release directives and, through his leadership, “recklessly released” more than 1,000,000 illegal immigrants into the United States.
Fallon brought an additional impeachment charge alleging Mayorkas had perjured himself when he told Congress, under oath, that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has maintained “operational control” over the security of the U.S. border. In a third impeachment charge, Fallon accused Mayorkas of having slandered U.S. Border Patrol agents with his comments about allegations they had whipped illegal immigrants who attempted to cross the border.
Judiciary Committee Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) voiced their support for impeaching Mayorkas after a committee hearing on Wednesday.
Jordan told NTD he hasn’t called for Mayorkas’s impeachment but said the secretary “certainly warrants it.”
“But whether we will, you know, move in that direction is going to be determined by Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, in consultation with the speaker and the Republican conference,” he said.
While Jordan favors impeaching Mayorkas, at least one Republican on his committee has said Mayorkas’s actions haven’t met the threshold for impeachment.
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told NTD on Wednesday that he doesn’t believe Mayorkas has yet committed a high crime or misdemeanor and instead called for Republicans to invoke the Holman rule to cut the secretary’s salary.
Democrats on the committee defended Mayorkas’s record on the job.
“This whole nonsense about the open border, that the Biden administration is open border, it’s just not true,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told NTD.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) agreed, saying, “I think it’s pretty clearly, from what my colleagues across the aisle have said, this is to make a political point, not to actually examine the facts.”
Currently, Republicans control 222 seats in the House of Representatives while Democrats hold 212 seats. The House Republican conference would need to muster virtually all of its members to support impeaching Mayorkas. The effort would then face longer odds in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where two-thirds of the body would be needed to convict Mayorkas and remove him from office.
Jordan Weighs In on Biden, Trump Classified Documents Cases
As the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Jordan is leading several oversight investigations into the Biden administration, including the recent discoveries of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s private residence and former office space.
Some of Biden’s supporters have sought to establish a distinction between how Biden handled the classified documents and how former President Donald Trump handled the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago home. In a Jan. 17 call with reporters, White House spokesman Ian Sams said the Biden team had handled his classified information “the right way” by immediately notifying authorities after they discovered potentially classified documents at Biden’s home and office.
Sams described Republican investigative efforts as “political stunts” and criticized them for seeking investigations of Biden after having defended former President Donald Trump when FBI agents raided his home for classified documents in August.
Jordan responded to such defenses from Biden’s supporters by noting a recent Washington Post article claiming “Biden’s attorneys and Justice Department investigators both thought they had a shared understanding about keeping the matter quiet.”
The first classified documents were found in Biden’s old office space at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, just days before the 2022 midterm elections. Neither the Biden White House nor the Department of Justice mentioned that discovery until Jan. 9, 2023, over two months after the midterm elections. When the Biden White House revealed, on Jan. 9, that potentially classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, they did not mention the fact that a subsequent search of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home had uncovered additional classified documents in December.
Jordan said it was wrong for the DOJ to have its alleged “shared understanding” with the Biden team about its classified documents case “when in fact they had this very public raid, as you all remember, 91 days before the midterm election at President Trump’s house.”