CV NEWS FEED // In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT, argued that the Senate has a “duty” to start a trial after the House’s impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February.
“When House Speaker Mike Johnson sends the Senate the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-NY] is obligated to prepare for a trial,” Cruz and Lee wrote in the op-ed.
“Instead Mr. Schumer plans to offer a motion to table the articles of impeachment by majority vote,” the senators continued.
“The Constitution, Senate rules and precedent are clear: The Senate has an obligation to vote on articles of impeachment,” they outlined:
In the nation’s history, there have been 21 instances in which the House has sent articles of impeachment to the Senate. In three of those cases, the official who was impeached had left office, so the Senate didn’t proceed. In the other 18 cases—including Donald Trump’s second impeachment, which the House delivered after his term ended—the Senate conducted a trial and senators ultimately voted guilty or not guilty. That’s the process demanded by the Constitution and clearly laid out in the Senate rules.)
“Republicans have respected this process,” Cruz and Lee noted. “We were in the majority during President Trump’s first impeachment, in 2020.”
“We fulfilled our constitutional duty and held a full trial on the floor,” they added. “Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Senate Democrats are trying to destroy yet another precedent and further politicize the impeachment process.”
>> HOUSE IMPEACHES MAYORKAS BY ONE VOTE <<
Cruz and Lee stated that Schumer and the rest of their Democratic colleagues “want to avoid an uncomfortable election-year discussion about President [Joe] Biden’s biggest failure: the U.S. southern border invasion.”
“Democrats will shatter another norm and set a dangerous precedent that they’re going to regret,” the pair of lawmakers stressed.
“Mr. Schumer has an incentive to pretend that the charges against Mr. Mayorkas are baseless, as American outrage at the unprecedented invasion of millions across our southern border endangers Mr. Biden’s re-election and Mr. Schumer’s majority,” they further noted.
“Americans shouldn’t take [Schumer’s] word for it—they should demand a trial,” the senators concluded.
Cruz took to X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday morning writing, “Chuck Schumer wants to avoid holding a trial for Alejandro Mayorkas’s impeachment since he is terrified of the American people hearing the facts.”
“What Mayorkas has done on behalf of Joe Biden is utterly unprecedented,” Cruz said on Wednesday’s episode of his “Verdict” podcast.
“He has aided and abetted the criminal invasion of this country by 10.4 million illegal immigrants,” the senator continued. “The volume of it is qualitatively different than anything we’ve ever seen before in our nation’s history.”
“It’s the highest level of illegal immigration,” he emphasized:
It’s not that Alejandro Mayorkas is incompetent. It’s not that he’s negligent. It’s not that he’s bad at his job. It is that he has decided to utterly and completely defy federal law – to ignore, to violate federal law, and to release millions and millions of illegal immigrants including murderers, including child molestors, including rapists.
“The illegal immigrants that [Mayorkas] is releasing and that Joe Biden is releasing have gone on to murder people, to rape people, to assault people, to commit horrific crimes – and that was utterly predictable,” Cruz stated.
Lee meanwhile appeared to challenge Democrats to hold a trial. He seemed to imply that if the embattled secretary is truly as innocent as Democrats claim, he would be acquitted.
“If Democrats are certain that Secretary Mayorkas didn’t destroy our border, increase human trafficking, and parole millions of illegals into our country, then let’s hold a trial and you can prove it,” Lee wrote on X Monday.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
A late February Harvard poll found that over 60% of Americans – including just under half of Democrats – supported the House’s impeachment of Mayorkas two weeks prior.
CatholicVote reported at the time that “[t]he poll asked respondents if they supported or opposed the House’s decision to impeach the DHS chief ‘under the charge that he is willfully not enforcing immigration laws and securing the border?’”
>> POLL: OVER 6 IN 10 AMERICANS WANT MAYORKAS IMPEACHED <<
CatholicVote continued:
Sixty-two percent of voters surveyed indicated that they supported impeachment, while 38% opposed it.
When respondents were broken down by party, 81% of Republicans, 54% of independents, and a stunning 48% of Democrats supported impeaching Mayorkas.
These results contrast with the near-party-line vote in the House – where not a single Democrat voted to impeach.
Readers can find Cruz and Lee’s full op-ed here.
The post Sens. Cruz and Lee: Senate Has ‘Duty’ To Put House’s Impeachment of Mayorkas to Trial appeared first on CatholicVote org.