The next leader of the House Homeland Security Committee will determine whether Republicans aggressively beef up border security and strive to end the record-high influx of illegal immigrants or hold the Biden administration’s feet to the fire for its actions since taking office.
Six Republicans have thrown in their hats for the job of chairman, a coveted position responsible for setting the agenda of the committee for two years. The top Republican on the minority at present, Rep. John Katko (R-NY), is retiring from Congress in early January, leaving a vacancy.
But for Republicans who will regain control of the committee after winning a majority of seats in the House, it is not a matter of who is most popular but the direction of the GOP.
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More centrist Republicans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) want to focus on ending the humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border, where federal police have recorded 4 million encounters with illegal immigrants since President Joe Biden took office.
Crenshaw is one of the more recent candidates to jump in the race. He served on the committee during his first term and was tapped to chair its oversight panel as a freshman. He was moved in his second term to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
He recently introduced a bill that would go after the money of drug and human smuggling organizations profiting from the border crisis, an effort to gain control of the southern border.
“We must take the cartels seriously and deter them and target them the same way we do terrorists,” Crenshaw said in a statement about the legislation. “They are more than a criminal threat — they are a national security threat, and we should treat them that way.”
Further right, other Republicans want to prioritize investigations and oversight of the Biden administration’s actions in its first two years. Those lawmakers are Reps. Mark Green of Tennessee, Michael Guest of Mississippi, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Dan Bishop of North Carolina.
Of the six candidates, Bishop, Guest, and Higgins are on the committee. The other three are previous members.
Bishop has promised to focus his chairmanship on bringing the Biden administration to account for how he believes it has ignored the border crisis and other issues.
“They’ve been unprecedented,” Bishop told Bloomberg. “The use of oversight needs to be unprecedented as well.”
Bishop joined Crenshaw, Green, and Guest in an April letter in which they accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of trying to “dismantle the security of our nation’s southern border.”
Higgins and Perry want to take oversight a step further and remove Mayorkas from office. The two introduced a resolution in August to impeach the Biden nominee.
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The GOP Steering Committee, not House Republicans, will choose the chairman.
