Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene withdrew a second attempt to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday, saying she had received guarantees a House committee would “move forward” on impeaching the Homeland Security secretary.
“I have been guaranteed that we’ll move forward with impeaching Mayorkas. The good thing is, is that my articles of impeachment are in the Homeland [Security] Committee, where we can move forward,” Greene said.
The Georgia Republican first triggered a vote on impeaching Mayorkas roughly two weeks ago, leapfrogging over GOP leadership. At the time, eight Republicans voted with Democrats to send the articles to committee, and Greene acknowledged ahead of Thursday’s vote that she hadn’t spoken to the holdouts to see if they had changed their position.
At least one made it clear they hadn’t — Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), who called Greene’s impeachment attempt “manifestly unserious” and the idea that two-thirds of the Senate would remove him a “delusional fantasy.”
“What is the practical effect of impeaching Mayorkas, other than assuring that Republicans will have no defense when a future Democrat majority turns this new definition against them?” he added, accusing Greene of trying to expand what qualifies as an impeachable offense.
Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who is conducting a sweeping investigation into Mayorkas and the border, hasn’t said publicly if he will ultimately make a referral to the Judiciary Committee, which would handle an impeachment. But Greene indicated she had received assurances, without specifying from who, that the committee would advance impeachment. She said she’d spoken to Speaker Mike Johnson and Green.
Greene indicated earlier this week that she had also heard little from the top ranks of her conference, contrasting the silence from Speaker Mike Johnson to how she believes ex-GOP leader Kevin McCarthy would have handled it if the Californian were still speaker. Johnson, unlike McCarthy, has backed impeaching Mayorkas. But McCarthy had a closer relationship and was in more frequent contact with Greene.
“It’s something that should be a priority for him as speaker of the House,” Greene said, adding that she believes McCarthy would have reached out to her about the effort.
Greene added that she would “just keep reintroducing” the impeachment articles, predicting that “the American people will not tolerate Republicans continuing to vote it down.”
Mayorkas was once viewed as the House GOP majority’s most likely impeachment target, with frustration over the Biden administration’s handling of the border a unifying through line for a conference that frequently finds itself at odds.
But impeachment advocates have struggled to lock down the votes needed to recommend booting him from office, amid skepticism from a swath of their GOP colleagues that his actions meet the bar for impeachment, rather than just a policy disagreement.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, in a statement, said that Congress should “stop wasting time and do its job by reforming our broken immigration system, reauthorizing vital tools for DHS, and passing the Administration’s supplemental request.”
Meanwhile, House Republicans are nearing the end of a broad impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, and are under pressure from their right flank to show progress on that front. They are expected to hold a conference meeting on Friday to discuss the Biden investigation.