by Frank Bowman

House Republicans today charged ahead with an impeachment vote on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. And ran straight into a brick wall. The nays had it 214-216.

In normal times, this result would have been entirely predictable, even inevitable given both a complete want of evidence that Mayorkas committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” and universal disapproval from those with even a nodding acquaintance with the text and history of the Constitution’s impeachment clauses.

It is no secret that the House Republicans’ motivation for seeking Secretary Mayorkas impeachment has been crassly political. They want to put immigration front and center in the 2024 election, as does former President Trump. Hence, it makes cynical sense both to block the bipartisan immigration deal pending in the Senate and to impeach Mayorkas for nothing more than being the face of Biden Administration immigration policy.

Even so, the temptation to employ impeachment against cabinet officers for purely partisan reasons has existed since the founding of the Republic. Only once, in the case of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, has the House yielded to them (by impeaching Belknap after he had already resigned). But even the Belknap case is easily distinguishable from the Republican’s pursuit of Mayorkas because Belknap indisputably did commit the impeachable offense of bribery.

For some 235 years, members of Congress have understood that neither cabinet officers nor presidents were to be impeached for mere disputes over policy, and that commencing a practice of impeachments for policy disputes would subvert the basic separation of powers design of the Constitution and weaken impeachment as a tool for dealing with truly dangerous executive office holders.

So some other explanation for the Republicans’ present constitutional heedlessness seems required.

The common hypothesis is simply that Congress generally, but more particularly its Republican membership, has become more overtly partisan than has been true at any time in living memory. And more importantly that the Republican Party is no longer a conventional American political party interested in legislative success and competent governance, but an extremist movement in thrall to a disturbed authoritarian.

This, I think, is the core problem behind most of Congress’s current dysfunction, and also the primary explanation of the Mayorkas impeachment travesty. Nevertheless, there are corollaries that help explain how this particular debacle unfolded.

One striking phenomenon is the degree to which the “Impeach Mayorkas” train has been driven by novices, newcomers to leadership and indeed to Congress itself, with little or no knowledge of congressional rules, norms, and traditions; a shocking ignorance of the proper role of Congress in the constitutional system; and an evident disrespect for the institution in which they serve.

It has often been remarked that current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is in only his fourth two-year term in the House, and that he is the least experienced Speaker in 140 years. But the experience levels of those most directly involved in the Mayorkas impeachment are even lower.

The event that precipitated impeachment hearing in the House Homeland Security Committee was privileged motion to impeach the Secretary introduced the House floor by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a, shall we say, noisy member in her second term. The parliamentary vehicle for avoiding immediate impeachment by the whole House was a motion to refer the matter to the Homeland Security Committee.

The Homeland Security Committee could have buried Greene’s incendiary screed in the queue of other work, as has been the custom for both parties when confronted by exhibitionist impeachment petitions from fringe members. Instead, Homeland Security Chairman, Mark Green (R-TN), chose to make it an immediate priority.

That Chairman Green acted as he did is, of course, primarily a consequence of the general radicalization of the House Republican caucus. But it is also, I suspect, a result of the sheer inexperience of both Green and his Republican colleagues.

Incredibly, Rep. Green, the chair of a major committee, was himself first elected in 2018. And of the eighteen Republican members of Homeland Security, Green is junior in seniority to only two members – Michael McCaul (R-TX), elected in 2005, and Clay Higgins (R-LA), elected in 2016. Two Republican committee members other than Chairman Green were elected in 2018, five were first elected in 2020, and eight are serving their first terms in Congress. Moreover, of the eighteen Republican committee members, only three had prior state legislative experience.

In short, this is a group that collectively has virtually no experience actually doing the primary job Congress, or indeed any legislature, is supposed to do — inquire soberly into the problems of the country, craft legislation to provide solutions to those problems, and negotiate with other members (of both the other party and one’s own) to agree on statutory language which can gain the approval of a bicameral legislature and the signature of the President.

Of course, one cannot attribute the intemperate conduct of Homeland Security Republicans entirely to callow inexperience. The nature of their brief tenures also matters. The congressional lives of Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee have consisted almost entirely of serving in the minority as members of a party that now confers influence based not on seniority or legislative accomplishment but on some combination of performative obnoxiousness and regular expressions of fealty to Donald Trump.

Still their collective inexperience seems a likely contributing factor.

A source of strength for any well-established institution is the accumulated wisdom embodied in its rules, traditions, norms, and expectations, a wisdom preserved in the institutional memory of its long-serving members. In any sound organization of long standing, when mad schemes are proposed, the older, more experienced, more prudent members are apt to put a brake on foolishness by noting how contrary the new scheme is to institutional values, institutional interests, and long-settled norms. Any organization which has lost its prudent older generation, or perhaps has consciously determined to ignore them, is apt to fall into self-defeating error.

The House Republican caucus now seems to have only a tiny handful of sober keepers of the institutional flame. But on this occasion, that handful was enough. The rest of the caucus, marching heedlessly beneath the standard of House novices Speaker Mike Johnson and Chairman Mark Green, blundered to an embarrassing defeat.

Of course, it appears Speaker Johnson will take another run when Rep Steve Scalise (R-LA) returns from cancer treatment. But neither the merits of the case nor the amateurishness of its advocates will change…