The House will postpone its plans to send articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate after concerns from Republican senators that Democrats would push to table a trial if brought to the floor too soon.
After a request from a group of GOP senators on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) agreed to delay transferring the articles until Monday. The House was initially scheduled to send the articles to the Senate on Wednesday.
“To ensure the Senate has adequate time to perform its constitutional duty, the House will transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate next week,” Johnson spokesman Taylor Haulsee said in a statement. “There is no reason whatsoever for the Senate to abdicate its responsibility to hold an impeachment trial.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) confirmed that the impeachment articles would reach the upper chamber on Monday after Republican senators pushed for a later trial. That request came as some Democratic lawmakers have indicated they would vote to table the impeachment articles, avoiding a trial altogether.
“The speaker, we asked him to delay sending over the articles until Monday to at least give us a full week,” Kennedy said, speaking to reporters on Tuesday. “We’ll see if [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer honors the extra time.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said he’s grateful Johnson decided to delay the trial to give the process more time to play out.
“We don’t want this to come over on the eve of the moment when members might be operating under the influence of jet fume intoxication — that was precisely the plan, and it’s much better for us to do this at the beginning of the legislative week rather than toward the end of one, and I thank them for doing that.”
The move comes after the House impeached Mayorkas in February by a 214-213 vote on charges that he failed to enforce U.S. immigration law. The lower chamber was first expected to deliver the articles by the end of February, but Republicans later indicated they would wait until after Congress averted a partial government shutdown later that month.
“We’re ready to go whenever they are,” Schumer said speaking to reporters after news Johnson is delaying delivery of the Mayorkas’s impeachment articles. “We’re sticking with our plan. We’re going to move this as expeditiously as possible.”
The Democratic-controlled Senate has floated the idea of tabling the articles, which has not been done in more than 20 impeachment hearings in the body’s history. It could also move to launch a trial committee and refer the articles to that panel.
To move on tabling the measure, Democrats would only need a simple, 51-vote majority. However, it would require that all Democrats vote straight party-line and do not defect.
Senate Republicans called any offer to block Mayorkas’s impeachment trial from moving forward would be the “nuclear option,” equating the move with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision to do away with the filibuster for executive branch appointments and judicial nominations, with the exception of the Supreme Court back in 2013.
“Tabling these impeachment articles is a nuclear option; in our estimation this is a nuclear option and it will necessitate some kind of nuclear retaliation, as much as when Harry Reid went nuclear in 2013 with his judges moving forward, invoking the nuclear option and it came back to bite them in the form of Neil Gorsuch in 2017,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
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The Department of Homeland Security has maintained that House Republicans’ effort to investigate and impeach the Cabinet official is nothing more than an election-year political sham.
“Without a shred of evidence or legitimate Constitutional grounds, and despite bipartisan opposition, House Republicans have falsely smeared a dedicated public servant who has spent more than 20 years enforcing our laws and serving our country,” DHS spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement following the Feb. 13 vote.
