House Speaker Mike Johnson has tapped Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, as one of 11 impeachment managers who will present the House’s case in a Senate trial against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
After a failed first attempt last week, the House on Tuesday voted on a Republican-led resolution to impeach Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border.
Cline, who has represented Virginia’s 6th Congressional District since 2019, will now join his fellow managers in delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate, where the GOP effort is all but certain to fail because Democrats control the chamber and a two-thirds majority would be needed to convict and remove Mayorkas from office.
“Secretary Mayorkas has knowingly and willfully neglected his oath of office, plunging America into the worst border crisis in our history,” Cline said in a statement. “Every community, including Virginia’s 6th District, is now a border community facing the consequences of his dereliction of duty. His failed leadership at the Department of Homeland Security has utilized loopholes within our immigration system, disregarded our established immigration laws, and imperiled every American citizen’s rights and security, which he swore an oath to defend.”
Johnson said previously that his office “has documented at least 64 specific actions” taken by President Joe Biden’s administration that “effectively opened our border and instituted the current chaos.” For Tuesday’s vote, the return of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, helped guarantee Republicans the votes they needed for the effort to advance.
But the vote was still close at 214-213, with all Democrats and three GOP lawmakers — Reps. Ken Buck, R-Colorado, Mike Gallagher, R-Wisconsin, and Tom McClintock, R-California — voting against it. Besides Cline, Reps. Morgan Griffith, R-Botetourt County, and Bob Good, R-Campbell County, voted to remove Mayorkas.
Cline said in his statement that during Mayorkas’ tenure, the United States has experienced an “unprecedented crisis that has empowered the cartels, increased human trafficking, spiked the flow of fentanyl,” and put each and every American citizen’s life at risk. “Through his actions and repeated attempts to deceive Congress and the American people, it is clear that Congress must exercise its constitutional duty and impeach Mayorkas,” Cline said.
Biden on Tuesday denounced the Republican charge to impeach Mayorkas. “History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” the president said in a statement after the vote.
The impeachment comes at the heels of a failed deal on a major bipartisan border security bill that Senate Republicans had initially negotiated with Democrats, but that they later said they could no longer support after some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, had attacked it as too weak.
Mayorkas is the first cabinet-level official to face impeachment since the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant in 1876, when War Secretary William Belknap handed Grant his resignation just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment.
