Almost all members of the Senate Republican conference have demanded that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer move forward with a full impeachment trial against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, while Senate Democrats are signaling they’ll dismiss charges against him quickly.
Forty-three of the Senate’s 49 Republicans, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., sent a letter to Schumer, D-N.Y., Thursday, urging members of the Senate to “uphold its constitutional responsibility to properly adjudicate the House of Representatives’ impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas,” reports The Washington Examiner.
Three of the six Republicans who did not sign the letter, Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Susan Collins, Maine; and Mitt Romney, Utah, have questioned whether the House has met the standards of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in its call for impeachment.
It was unclear why the other three Republicans, Sens. Tommy Tuberville, Alabama; Bill Cassidy, Louisiana; and Rand Paul, Kentucky, did not sign the letter. Tuberville has already called for a full Senate trial against Mayorkas, and Cassidy said this week he won’t support a measure to table the impeachment.
The senators noted in their letter that since 1797, the House has impeached 21 people and that trials “were held in every single instance, except once when an impeached judge resigned from office before the trial commenced.”
They insisted that as the House has accused Mayorkas of “demeaning his office,” on the matter of securing the border, the “American people deserve to hear the evidence through a Senate trial in a court of impeachment.”
