As the House Homeland Security Committee advanced articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over an invasion of the country by millions, Democrats and some Republicans argued that it was a “policy dispute” and not impeachable.
“Political and policy disagreements aren’t impeachable offenses,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Journal‘s own editorial board used that same line in its own subheader opposing impeachment, arguing that, “a policy dispute doesn’t qualify as a high crime and misdemeanor.”
Democrats have been making that argument all along.
The Democrat Committee on Homeland Security put forward a 45-page statement which mentions the word “policy” 45 times, and argues that, “iImpeachment is an extraordinary remedy under the United States Constitution. It is not a tool for policy or political differences.”
“This is simply a policy dispute, a disagreement about how a different party is attacking a policy problem. And the Republicans are trying to abuse their power and the Constitution to convert what is simply a disagreement into somehow some way, a high crime and misdemeanor there is no crime, much less a high crime or misdemeanor here,” Rep Dan Goldman contended.
Impeachment is not an “extraordinary remedy”, it’s just the ultimate form of congressional oversight. Presidents are not kings, they do not have unlimited power to do whatever they please, and cabinet members may be appointed by presidents, but they must be approved and serve at the pleasure of two branches of the federal government, and not just of one single man.
The same Democrats protesting that impeaching Mayorkas is an abuse of power were responsible for sending Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, to prison for refusing to testify before their partisan committee. That was and is an extraordinary abuse of power.
Mayorkas, unlike Navarro, is a sitting government official. Impeachment, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, involves those “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
Impeachable offenses “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself,” he wrote.
It’s hard to think of a better example than allowing millions of illegal aliens to invade the country, and doing everything possible to wilfully impede the efforts of states trying to slow that invasion.
As the internet meme goes, Homeland Security had one job. Is our homeland secure?
Entire cities have been overloaded and are groaning under the weight of an invasion that has no precedent in American history. Major cities are swarmed, police officers are being assaulted in broad daylight and stores are being cleaned out by massive mobs of illegal migrant invaders.
There were 2.5 million encounters at the border in the last fiscal year alone. And that does not count the millions more who were never ‘encountered’. The same House Committee on Homeland Security moving to impeach Secretary Mayorkas had released statistics showing that there were 269,735 encounters in just the last month of the fiscal year.
Nearly 7 million illegal alien invaders have shown up on Mayorkas’ and Biden’s watch. They include tens of thousands of gang members and criminals, hundreds of terrorists and enough fentanyl to kill every American ten times over… and those are just the ones that we caught.
Is 7 million illegal invaders a policy dispute or a war?
Biden, Mayorkas and other officials claim that they’re helpless to act and that they’re doing the best that they can, and that House Republicans can fix the problem with a “border deal.”
All of that is a lie.
The Biden administration calculatedly set out to dismantle every border security policy. It ended construction of the border wall and sued Arizona and Texas for trying to fortify their own borders. It fought in court to end Title 42 authority by claiming that the pandemic was over even as Biden tried to justify his massive student loan bailout plan because of the pandemic. It went to court to be able to not only release illegal alien invaders into America, but to do so without court dates.
When a court blocked the release of illegal aliens without court dates, Secretary Mayorkas denounced it as a “very harmful ruling.” During the negotiations for a ‘border deal’, the Biden administration insisted that preventing it from releasing illegal aliens into the country was a ‘red line’ that it could not compromise on. That’s because releasing them is the whole point.
You can file this under “treason” or “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but it is at its most elemental, a profound breach of the public trust with massively catastrophic consequences.
It is a “policy dispute” in the same sense that announcing China can freely invade California or that anyone born before 1959 can be freely killed without fear of prosecution is a policy dispute. In theory every policy position, no matter how horrifying, is a policy dispute. Public officials should not be casually impeached over policy disagreements, they should however be impeached when their malicious actions violate their duties and cause tremendous harm.
Of all the impeachments over the years, impeaching Mayorkas may be the most justified.
Past impeachments have often been partisan exercises or like the impeachment of Judge Alcee Hastings for bribery (who then became a long serving Democrat congressman) a matter of personal corruption where the overall public harm was either intangible or negligible.
The impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is not a matter of personal misconduct. There is no evidence that he is stealing, conducting an affair, taking or soliciting bribes or corrupting the government for his own personal agendas. His only actual crime is following orders.
And that’s the only argument against impeaching Mayorkas. He’s not acting on his own.
Enabling the mass invasion of the United States is not the action of one man, but of an administration, which has used every federal agency at its disposal, including the EPA, to enable that invasion, which has dispensed a fortune to the invaders to encourage them to invade, and another fortune to the refugee resettlers to make sure that they never leave.
And it’s not just the policy of one man or one administration, but of a party that has spent decades conniving, scheming and maneuvering, since the Kennedy administration, to fundamentally transform immigration law in order to shift the national demographics and the political culture through laws, UN treaties, economic incentives and the neglect of existing laws.
Elected officials can advocate for laws, no matter how destructive, and they can even lie about the consequences of those laws, as JFK and Ted Kennedy did about the shift toward third world immigration, as LBJ did about the disastrous UN refugee treaty that is at the heart of our asylum problem today, and as Senate Democrats did about their amnesty in 1986. But that amnesty, part of another in a series of “border deals” became part of the trend of not only advocating, but ignoring and refusing to enforce immigration laws. And then creating anti-immigration laws, such as sanctuary cities and states, and a federal crackdown on state immigration enforcement.
Beyond a refusal to enforce laws, Obama initiated a unilateral amnesty for some illegal aliens as part of what was deemed “selective enforcement” and “discretion”. That already illegal policy evolved under Biden into virtually no enforcement for anyone except the worst of the worst.
Elected officials and appointees have certain responsibilities, regardless of their partisan agendas, and there are consequences for failing to uphold them. As a partisan political appointee, Secretary Mayorkas would inevitably work toward open borders, as has every Democrat before him, but that did not change his responsibility to his official duties.
Overseeing and implementing an invasion is incompatible with those duties.
Elected officials can have policy disputes, but appointed officials are managing the machinery of the state which must continue to run despite their partisan leanings. An anti-war secretary of defense cannot simply drive all the tanks into the ocean and announce that the United States will no longer defend itself against enemy invasions. And, contrariwise, a conservative EPA head cannot reject the concept of pollution and refuse to fulfill the responsibilities of his office.
That is what Secretary Mayorkas has done. He was following orders, but that’s no excuse. Cabinet members may be chosen by presidents, but they answer to two branches of the government. That second branch of the government is preparing to impeach Mayorkas for actions that have wrecked entire cities, trashed much of the country and cost countless lives.
No one died because of anything that Clinton or Trump faced impeachment for, but people have died in sizable numbers because of the action and inaction of Secretary Mayorkas and Biden. The murders, fentanyl overdoses and diseases spreading across the nation are a crime. They are a high crime whose origin lies with the policies of Mayorkas and the Biden administration.
If a political official willfully refusing to do his duty leading to an invasion of millions and the deaths of over a hundred people doesn’t justify impeachment, what possibly does?
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Thank you for reading.
“Political and policy disagreements aren’t impeachable offenses,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Journal‘s own editorial board used that same line in its own subheader opposing impeachment, arguing that, “a policy dispute doesn’t qualify as a high crime and misdemeanor.”
Democrats have been making that argument all along.
“This is simply a policy dispute, a disagreement about how a different party is attacking a policy problem. And the Republicans are trying to abuse their power and the Constitution to convert what is simply a disagreement into somehow some way, a high crime and misdemeanor there is no crime, much less a high crime or misdemeanor here,” Rep Dan Goldman contended.
Impeachment is not an “extraordinary remedy”, it’s just the ultimate form of congressional oversight. Presidents are not kings, they do not have unlimited power to do whatever they please, and cabinet members may be appointed by presidents, but they must be approved and serve at the pleasure of two branches of the federal government, and not just of one single man.
The same Democrats protesting that impeaching Mayorkas is an abuse of power were responsible for sending Peter Navarro, a former Trump official, to prison for refusing to testify before their partisan committee. That was and is an extraordinary abuse of power.
Mayorkas, unlike Navarro, is a sitting government official. Impeachment, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, involves those “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
Impeachable offenses “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself,” he wrote.
It’s hard to think of a better example than allowing millions of illegal aliens to invade the country, and doing everything possible to wilfully impede the efforts of states trying to slow that invasion.
As the internet meme goes, Homeland Security had one job. Is our homeland secure?
Entire cities have been overloaded and are groaning under the weight of an invasion that has no precedent in American history. Major cities are swarmed, police officers are being assaulted in broad daylight and stores are being cleaned out by massive mobs of illegal migrant invaders.
There were 2.5 million encounters at the border in the last fiscal year alone. And that does not count the millions more who were never ‘encountered’. The same House Committee on Homeland Security moving to impeach Secretary Mayorkas had released statistics showing that there were 269,735 encounters in just the last month of the fiscal year.
Nearly 7 million illegal alien invaders have shown up on Mayorkas’ and Biden’s watch. They include tens of thousands of gang members and criminals, hundreds of terrorists and enough fentanyl to kill every American ten times over… and those are just the ones that we caught.
Is 7 million illegal invaders a policy dispute or a war?
Biden, Mayorkas and other officials claim that they’re helpless to act and that they’re doing the best that they can, and that House Republicans can fix the problem with a “border deal.”
All of that is a lie.
The Biden administration calculatedly set out to dismantle every border security policy. It ended construction of the border wall and sued Arizona and Texas for trying to fortify their own borders. It fought in court to end Title 42 authority by claiming that the pandemic was over even as Biden tried to justify his massive student loan bailout plan because of the pandemic. It went to court to be able to not only release illegal alien invaders into America, but to do so without court dates.
When a court blocked the release of illegal aliens without court dates, Secretary Mayorkas denounced it as a “very harmful ruling.” During the negotiations for a ‘border deal’, the Biden administration insisted that preventing it from releasing illegal aliens into the country was a ‘red line’ that it could not compromise on. That’s because releasing them is the whole point.
You can file this under “treason” or “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but it is at its most elemental, a profound breach of the public trust with massively catastrophic consequences.
It is a “policy dispute” in the same sense that announcing China can freely invade California or that anyone born before 1959 can be freely killed without fear of prosecution is a policy dispute. In theory every policy position, no matter how horrifying, is a policy dispute. Public officials should not be casually impeached over policy disagreements, they should however be impeached when their malicious actions violate their duties and cause tremendous harm.
Of all the impeachments over the years, impeaching Mayorkas may be the most justified.
Past impeachments have often been partisan exercises or like the impeachment of Judge Alcee Hastings for bribery (who then became a long serving Democrat congressman) a matter of personal corruption where the overall public harm was either intangible or negligible.
The impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas is not a matter of personal misconduct. There is no evidence that he is stealing, conducting an affair, taking or soliciting bribes or corrupting the government for his own personal agendas. His only actual crime is following orders.
And that’s the only argument against impeaching Mayorkas. He’s not acting on his own.
Enabling the mass invasion of the United States is not the action of one man, but of an administration, which has used every federal agency at its disposal, including the EPA, to enable that invasion, which has dispensed a fortune to the invaders to encourage them to invade, and another fortune to the refugee resettlers to make sure that they never leave.
And it’s not just the policy of one man or one administration, but of a party that has spent decades conniving, scheming and maneuvering, since the Kennedy administration, to fundamentally transform immigration law in order to shift the national demographics and the political culture through laws, UN treaties, economic incentives and the neglect of existing laws.
Elected officials can advocate for laws, no matter how destructive, and they can even lie about the consequences of those laws, as JFK and Ted Kennedy did about the shift toward third world immigration, as LBJ did about the disastrous UN refugee treaty that is at the heart of our asylum problem today, and as Senate Democrats did about their amnesty in 1986. But that amnesty, part of another in a series of “border deals” became part of the trend of not only advocating, but ignoring and refusing to enforce immigration laws. And then creating anti-immigration laws, such as sanctuary cities and states, and a federal crackdown on state immigration enforcement.
Beyond a refusal to enforce laws, Obama initiated a unilateral amnesty for some illegal aliens as part of what was deemed “selective enforcement” and “discretion”. That already illegal policy evolved under Biden into virtually no enforcement for anyone except the worst of the worst.
Elected officials and appointees have certain responsibilities, regardless of their partisan agendas, and there are consequences for failing to uphold them. As a partisan political appointee, Secretary Mayorkas would inevitably work toward open borders, as has every Democrat before him, but that did not change his responsibility to his official duties.
Overseeing and implementing an invasion is incompatible with those duties.
Elected officials can have policy disputes, but appointed officials are managing the machinery of the state which must continue to run despite their partisan leanings. An anti-war secretary of defense cannot simply drive all the tanks into the ocean and announce that the United States will no longer defend itself against enemy invasions. And, contrariwise, a conservative EPA head cannot reject the concept of pollution and refuse to fulfill the responsibilities of his office.
That is what Secretary Mayorkas has done. He was following orders, but that’s no excuse. Cabinet members may be chosen by presidents, but they answer to two branches of the government. That second branch of the government is preparing to impeach Mayorkas for actions that have wrecked entire cities, trashed much of the country and cost countless lives.
No one died because of anything that Clinton or Trump faced impeachment for, but people have died in sizable numbers because of the action and inaction of Secretary Mayorkas and Biden. The murders, fentanyl overdoses and diseases spreading across the nation are a crime. They are a high crime whose origin lies with the policies of Mayorkas and the Biden administration.
If a political official willfully refusing to do his duty leading to an invasion of millions and the deaths of over a hundred people doesn’t justify impeachment, what possibly does?
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
Comments
It is a disgrace that Mayorkas was ever approved to head the Dept. of Homeland Security.
ReplyDeleteA reminder: (Jan. 2021) 'Flashback: Biden’s DHS Nominee Tied to China, Visas-for-Sale Swamp Scandal'
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/01/26/flashback-bidens-dhs-nominee-tied-china-visas-sale-scandal/
""The report looked at various instances of alleged favoritism. It named Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and the Las Vegas Regional Center as well as an electric car company on which now-governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe was a board member and Anthony Rodham — the brother of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — was involved."....
More than 15 employees spoke out against Mayorkas at the time - "“Many employees concluded, not unreasonably, that the pressure exerted on them was because the individuals involved were politically connected,” the report reads."...
The Inspector General report link is dead in the Breitbart article, but here it is from the Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20210915042355/https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mga/OIG_mga-032415.pdf
For all practical purposes Alejandro Mayorkas - may his limbs wither and flesh fall from his bones, may his children be reduced to begging at the city gate - is unassailable. In the House we'd be lucky if every Republican voted for impeachment. In the Senate it simply won't fly...sorrowful, but predictable. It simply doesn't count when 'they' do it.
ReplyDeleteed
In Britain, when Labour were floundering in the early 2000s, their evil svengali fixer called Alastair Campbell sent Blair out on what they called the Party Masochism Strategy.
ReplyDeleteIn short,show your incompetence and seek out pity and draw the sting of righteous anger.
And Blair did have schoolboy charm back then.
This Mayorkas is like a playdo stress ball , like Prof Honeydew in the Muppets
Clearly knows nothing,cares even less. And sense that's why they let him.out to be pointlessly punched around the ring, because there's no consequences.
Bulldoze his house and hang him on a wind turbine at Eagle Pass.
More evil than Hamman.
The above comments illustrate my major question about all of this--Why are the Republicans doing nothing to stop this? They could do *something*. They could speak, introduce laws and even use lawfare if needed to stop this invasion. Why are they doing *nothing*?
ReplyDeletePossible answers--1, They agree with it. 2, They're being paid, or blackmailed, to ignore it. 3, They're lazy and incompetent and just don't care. But one answer that is NOT possible is 4, They're conscientious and hard working, and they're doing everything they can do to represent their constituents and to protect the US from harm.
I have a 2nd question--Why does the president have the authority to declare that our borders will be open and that we will ignore existing immigration laws? Isn't that for Congress to decide?
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