The Julian month of January is finally coming to its long-anticipated end today, the Lost Island of the Universal Solar Calendar. Given time, I could probably come up with a clever segue from the day's name to the subject matter of this post, but right now I'm too upset. I know I shouldn't watch the news during daytime hours and that it just makes me angry, but earlier, while simply trying to keep abreast of current events, I saw House Speaker Mike Johnson make his first floor speech to Congress. He used the opportunity to rail against the bipartisan immigration bill, even though final text of the bill hasn't even been completed yet.
Johnson insisted back in November that border security was so important and the "crisis at the border" so urgent that he wouldn’t possibly bring up aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza unless new border legislation was attached to it. But Trump has made it clear he wants to use immigration and border security as an issue in his run for the presidency, and the last thing Trump wants right now if for the problem to be solved and for Biden to get any credit for the solution.
So rather than addressing border security through legislation, House Republicans are moving forward instead with a hair-brained scheme to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They've already written articles of impeachment before even holding hearings, and claim that Mayorkas has committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" because he allegedly breached the public trust and refused to enforce immigration law.
Johnson insists that Mayorkas is constitutionally required to reduce illegal border crossings to “zero, ” but that is a standard that no previous Homeland Security secretary or previous administration has ever achieved. It's literally impossible to wall off every single means of entering this country by water, land, and air.
Further, the U.S. can't detain all of the people who cross the border illegally in part because there simply isn’t enough detention space to hold them all. Congress has not authorized the funding that the Biden administration has requested to provide additional detention capacity, so instead Homeland Security uses its judgment on who to detain and who to release.
That is not illegal. It is certainly not impeachable. It is the exact same kind of discretion that previous administrations, including Trump's, have used. During the last two years of the Trump administration, 52% of migrants apprehended at the southern border, nearly one million people, were released. And despite Republicans’ false claims that Biden has established “open borders,” immigrants were more likely to be released into the country during Trump's term than during Biden’s.
There is "zero" chance the Senate, dominated by Democrats, will convict Mayorkas even if the House, with its razor-thin Republican majority, impeaches him, but the extremist minority in the House that is going after him is attempting to set a precedent that a minority can stop the government from functioning.
Encouragingly, Sen. James Lankford, the top Republican negotiator for the border deal, pushed back against Trump and criticized “mischaracterizations” over the emerging deal. Lankford rejected characterizations that the deal would allow a flood of migrants to enter the U.S., saying the restrictions are far more onerous than anything before, and that the border would effectively be shut down when illegal crossings reach a certain threshold.
During today's speech, Johnson argued that Biden should do more to address the border crisis on his own using executive authority and that he has powers to help combat illegal immigration that he’s not using. He rejected Biden's “false claims” that Congress needs to pass new laws to allow him to close the southern border. Johnson even accused Biden and Mayorkas of having “designed this catastrophe.”
Johnson claims that section 212f of the Immigration Act gives the president broad authority to implement immigration restrictions, even though federal courts have already ruled that 212f authority conflicts with the Asylum Law and doesn’t override it.
This Republican obstructionism is now a global issue that threatens U.S. support for Ukraine. Johnson had said he would not bring forward a bill to provide supplemental funding for Ukraine unless it included measures for increased border security, and now he's rejected the bill to provide just that security. Meanwhile, Ukraine is defending itself against an invasion by Russia, and as historian Heather Cox Richardson points out, the struggle "is larger than one between two countries: it is the question of whether the rules-based international order put in place after World War II will survive, or whether the world will go back to a system in which stronger countries can gobble up less powerful ones."
But Trump has made his preference for Russia and Putin over Ukraine clear. He likes authoritarian strongmen, and believes that good personal relations with individual autocrats like Putin and Kim will translate to successful foreign policy. He's wrong, but even if he weren't he's the last person to try to use personal influence over these wily and manipulative rulers - his narcissism and gullibility would result in disastrous outcomes for the U.S.
The war has already weakened Russia significantly, and aid to Ukraine has amounted to less than 5% of the U.S. defense budget, “a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns for the United States and notable returns for American industry,” according to CIA Director William Burns. For the United States to walk away from the conflict at this crucial moment and cut off support to Ukraine would be an mistake of historic proportions. To walk away over an immigration stance solely taken to give Trump an election issue would be folly of the highest order.
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