On Wed, Jan 10, I had the honor of appearing as a witness at the first hearing on the effort to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Secy of the Department of Homeland Security.

The essence of my testimony was simple: Neither a president nor a cabinet officer can be impeached without conclusive proof of commission of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And a dispute over public policy (here immigration policy)- even a very heated dispute — does not fall into any of the constitutional categories.

This constitutional position is, I think, irrefutable. Indeed, it was not contested by the Republican members of the Committee, or indeed by the three Republican witnesses, all state attorneys general. Rather, they tried to argue that Secy Mayorkas’s conduct of his office both “violated the law” and has produced a variety of grave harms to the country.

I anticipated and debunked the “violation of law” argument some months ago in an article in Just Security, linked here. I hope to write more shortly about the supposed causal connection between the alleged violations of law and the primary harm alleged by the Republican witnesses to have resulted – to wit, increases of fentanyl imports and resultant addiction, death, etc. As I think one can easily show, there is little, and I’d say virtually no, connection between the two things.

For those who would like to know more about what happened at the hearing itself, the committee hearing website is linked here.

You can watch the video of the whole hearing, if you like (though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it). If you want to read the witnesses’ written testimony, it can be found through a link at the bottom of the hearing page. In an approach that I’ve never seen before, the Committee majority has placed all the witness testimony in a single document, the result of which is that one has to scroll through 19 pages of Republican witness testimony before reaching the testimony of the only Democratic witness.