The impeachment trial in Congress against the US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, took months to get started and has ended in a matter of just hours. The Senate received the charges with which the House of Representatives accused the person responsible for US immigration policy on Tuesday and, 24 hours later, determined that the accusation was unconstitutional. The case has been cancelled, by 51 votes - those of the Democratic group - compared to 49 of the Republicans.
Mayorkas was charged by the House of Representatives with two counts of dereliction of duty by willfully disregarding federal immigration laws and breach of public trust by allegedly making false statements about the state of border security. The secretary had rejected both accusations.
The process in the upper house began early in the afternoon with the oath of hundreds of senators as jurors, as stipulated by protocol. Next, the Democratic majority leader, Chuck Schumer, called a vote to declare the first charge unconstitutional for not meeting the requirement established by US law for an impeachment trial: that it be a crime of extreme seriousness. All 51 senators from his party spoke in favor. Among Republicans, 48 were against it. One senator from this group, Lisa Murkowski, abstained.
The second charge was similarly defeated. In this vote, the Democratic caucus once again spoke out in unison: 51 yeses to declare it unconstitutional. This time, Murkowski joined the rest of her parliamentary group to add 49 noes. The third vote approved ending the trial.
The polarization that the case aroused was evident in the statements of the representatives of the respective parties. Schumer had declared in his speech before the senators that the
impeachment
against Mayorkas, the first in 150 years against a member of the US government who was not the president, constituted the "least legitimate, least substantial and most politicized impeachment trial in history." ”.
The leader of the Republican minority, Mitch McConnell, for his part, protested at the end of the event that the Senate had not examined the charges and had ruled on whether or not Mayorkas committed the crimes of which he was accused. “It is an unfortunate precedent. “It implies that the Senate can, in practice, ignore the impeachment presented to it by the House of Representatives,” he opined.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
Republican congressmen had promised to launch the impeachment trial against the Secretary of Homeland Security of President Joe Biden's Administration after winning the majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections. Internal divisions and other priorities were postponing those threats.
Finally, the replacement of the presidency of the House last October, when the Republicans removed the man they had appointed to the position just nine months before, Kevin McCarthy, and replaced him with Mike Johnson, and the arrival of migrants to the southern border of the United States in record numbers opened the door for the deputies who demanded Mayorkas's head to launch into the option of impeachment.
A first attempt ended in resounding failure: the Republicans did not get enough votes to approve the measure, due to several medical casualties in their caucus and three of their deputies aligned themselves with the Democrats against the
impeachment.
A week later, with some patients reinstated, the motion passed by a single vote, 214 to 213.
Once the charges were approved, it took the House two months to transfer them to the Senate, where it was always clear that Democratic control would block the trial: 67 votes would have been necessary to have convicted Mayorkas. That is, 49 Republicans and 18 from the rival party, something unthinkable in a political climate as polarized as the current one in the United States and given the Democratic opinion that the charges were not sustained.
Follow all the information on the elections in the United States in
our weekly newsletter
.