WASHINGTON (JTA) — Voting along party lines, the U.S. Senate buried impeachment proceedings targeting the Jewish Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
All 51 senators caucusing with Democrats voted on Wednesday to adjourn the impeachment before proceedings started. All 49 Republicans voted against adjourning, with one voting present on one count of impeachment.
The vote brings to an end attempts to impeach Mayorkas over how he has handled undocumented migrants entering the United States from Mexico. The impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives barely passed in February, 214-213 — and even then, the first vote failed. Rep. Mike Johnson, the Republican from Louisiana who is speaker, had to bring it up for a vote a second time.
Jewish groups had expressed alarm at the impeachment process, noting repeated invocations during the impeachment hearings of the Great Replacement theory, a baseless conspiracy theory whose original version claims that Jews are behind an effort to replace the populations of majority-white countries with immigrants of color.
“This impeachment effort was nothing more than a cynical political stunt that further normalized deadly antisemitic, white supremacist ‘invasion’ and ‘replacement’ conspiracy theories,” Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a liberal-leaning community relations group, said in a statement.
A record number of migrants have been crossing the U.S.-Mexico border recently, and Republicans charged that the border is out of control because Mayorkas is willfully ignoring existing laws. They say the situation amounts to the high crimes and misdemeanors necessary for impeachment.
Democrats said Mayorkas is carrying out Biden administration policy, which does not meet any criminal standard, and that he has scored successes in managing the border situation.
Impeaching Mayorkas was a key political aim of former President Donald Trump, whose campaign this year for reelection has focused on the border crisis.
