Four Republican lawmakers flipped on their party and killed the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a stunning vote Tuesday night.
The lawmakers saved Mayorkas and voted with all Democrats, handing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a massive loss. The impeachment effort failed in a 216-214 vote.
Here are lawmakers who turned on their party:
Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO)
Buck signaled ahead of time that he had no intention of supporting impeaching Mayorkas. On Monday, Buck wrote an op-ed laying out his reasoning.
“To be clear, Secretary Mayorkas has completely failed at his job. He is incompetent. He is an embarrassment. And he will most likely be remembered as the worst secretary of Homeland Security in the history of the United States,” Buck wrote. “However, the Constitution is clear that impeachment is reserved for ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ Maladministration or incompetence does not rise to what our founders considered an impeachable offense.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI)
An intense whip effort on the floor Tuesday night wasn’t enough to convince Gallagher to stay onside and vote with the rest of his party.
Gallagher, a rising star in the party who was briefly floated as an option to run against Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), has an intense focus on foreign affairs. He is the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA)
Like Buck, McClintock, who represents a safe Republican seat in a deep-blue state, has voiced concerns about whether the complaints about Mayorkas’s job performance met the bar to rise to impeachment.
Besides the constitutional questions at play, the California Republican has voiced a concern that impeaching Mayorkas for a less than airtight constitutional violation might set a negative precedent that later Congresses will continue to escalate.
Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT)
Moore initially cast a vote supporting impeachment but switched his vote to a “nay” at the end in order to avoid a tie, which will allow Republicans to bring a motion to reconsider the impeachment later.
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Johnson said after the failed vote that he plans to bring the motion back to the floor at a later date, when Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was away from Washington as part of his treatment for blood cancer, is back in the chamber. Scalise is expected to support Mayorkas’s impeachment.
Conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) brought the impeachment charges against Mayorkas, which were drawn up by the House Homeland Security Committee. The articles accused Mayorkas of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breaching the public trust related to his handling of the border crisis.”
