The midterm elections are still over three months away, but that isn’t stopping Republicans from openly laying out their political plans for if they take control of the House of Representatives. In what would likely be a replay of the game plan used in Benghazi investigations, conservative politicians are proposing to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the current Secretary of Homeland Security, in an effort to stir up support for the 2024 election.
Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs, one of the representatives who requested a pardon from Donald Trump following the January 6 Capitol Insurrection, already introduced a resolution last August calling for Mayorkas’s impeachment for the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of supposedly not protecting the USA-Mexico border and allowing a mostly-imagined immigration crisis. However, it is Texas Senator Ted Cruz who has now taken up the charge of pushing for the nakedly-partisan measure of making a manufactured spectacle for the media to cover.
In an interview with the far-right media outlet Newsmax, Cruz detailed his belief that the Senate has an “obligation to conduct a serious trial” into Mayorkas’s term as Homeland Security Secretary in order to detail the situation at the border “in front of the American people.” He then went on to use his newly-coined phrase of “Biden body bags” to describe the migrants who have died crossing the border like those in the recent San Antonio truck-trailer tragedy.
The tasteless term is particularly ironic due to the fact that Cruz has consistently advocated for policies that make the legal immigration process more difficult, and his party is only becoming more extreme on the issue.
Cruz, along with his fellow Texas Senator John Cornyn, recently led a group of Republican senators to the Texas border both to hold a showy press conference as well as to be briefed by prominent anti-immigration allies like the National Border Patrol Council, the president of which has publicly pushed the white supremacist “great replacement” theory.
Republicans are focusing on the border in order to demonize poor families fleeing the horrors of their homelands, whilst pregnant Americans are heading to Mexico in order to get more easily-accessible abortion healthcare. If the Republicans win the House this November, Cruz’s plan will likely come to pass, and this period of right-wing exhibitionism and liberal backsliding will not only continue but worsen. For progressives looking on, Democratic success in the midterm elections is the key to keeping the next session of Congress from being even more dispiriting than the current one.
Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
