Highlights: Senate rejects impeachment articles against DHS Secretary Mayorkas

In the end, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s objection to allowing for debate and procedural votes ahead of the Democrats’ motions to dispense with the two articles of impeachment precluded Republicans from putting Democrats in a tough spot with substantive votes.

Republicans had planned to force Democrats to take tough votes, like on the constitutionality of not holding a trial. But because Schmitt objected to a debate agreement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., immediately moved to question the constitutionality of the articles of impeachment. And that meant Republican senators could only force votes on procedural questions like adjourning or going into closed session. 

Schmitt, R-Mo., was pressed on his decision by reporters and responded by saying: “Impeachments aren’t debatable. So if you have an impeachment trial, we don’t debate that — we listen, we hear evidence. All we were asking for is something that has happened every single time articles of impeachment have ever come over the United States Senate.”

Schumer said afterward that Republicans were not “prepared” after they “denied our fair and reasonable offer and didn’t seem to know what to do."

The White House praised Democrats for dismissing the impeachment."Once and for all, the Senate has rightly voted down this baseless impeachment that even conservative legal scholars said was unconstitutional," spokesperson Ian Sams said.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said that the House's impeachment of Mayorkas was political and that it would have set a worse precedent to move forward with a trial.

"This is a different process than we would run other impeachments," he said. "I judge the danger of normalizing the House impeachment process as much graver than the 'dangerous setting of the process/precedent in the Senate.' There was nothing close to high crime or misdemeanor. ... Everyone knows it. It would be irresponsible for us to treat it as serious exercise."

Murphy was the lead Democratic negotiator on a bipartisan border bill that Mayorkas helped craft earlier this year, but which Republicans rejected.

"The irony of all of this is that Mayorkas was in the room for all the negotiations at the request of the Republicans who just voted to proceed to an impeachment trial. ... If we’ve done a trial, and you’d gotten to a final vote, many of those Republicans would have voted against impeachment, I acknowledge that. But Mayorkas was in the room because of the credibility he has with Senate Republicans," Murphy said. "That’s why it’s so wild to me that he is such a subject of animosity for House Republicans because, in the Senate, he seems to have a decent amount of credibility, notwithstanding legitimate disagreements Senate Republicans have with Biden’s immigration policy."

The Department of Homeland Security said Democrats were right to reject the impeachment articles.

The Senate vote "proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment," DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.

"It’s time for Congressional Republicans to support the Department’s vital mission instead of wasting time playing political games and standing in the way of commonsense, bipartisan border reforms," she said.

House Republican leadership released a statement accusing the Senate of "ignoring its constitutional duty to hold a trial."

“By voting unanimously to bypass their constitutional responsibility, every single Senate Democrat has issued their full endorsement of the Biden Administration’s dangerous open border policies," House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his leadership team wrote.

"The American people will hold Senate Democrats accountable for this shameful display," the statement continued.

Immediately after the trial ended, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., addressed members on the floor.

"We've set a very unfortunate precedent here which means that the Senate can ignore, in effect, the House’s impeachment," McConnell said. "It doesn’t make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not: He was."

"And by doing what we just did, we have, in effect, ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial," he continued. "We had no evidence, no procedure. This is a day — it’s not a proud day in the history of the Senate."

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., joked with reporters that the impeachment trial was "awesome," calling it "the apex of civil life right now. … It was a miracle."

Asked to respond to Republican warnings that this would set a precedent for future trials, Fetterman responded: "We were all just pissing away all our time here. … This was just like a bad show I was forced to watch."

In a statement released at the end of the Senate trial process, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said that "what’s happening at our southern border is completely unacceptable" and "the Biden Administration must do more to keep Montana and our country safe."

Tester is up for re-election in red Montana in November and voted with all other Democrats to dismiss the impeachment articles against Mayorkas.

"Montanans want real solutions that secure the border, not partisan games from D.C. politicians," Tester said. "I agree with my Republican colleagues who have said this exercise is a distraction that fails to make our country safer. It’s time for President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas to use their remaining executive authorities to help secure our border, and for Congress to pass bipartisan border security legislation to give law enforcement the resources and policy changes they have said they need to get the job done.”

The Senate voted 51-49 to adjourn the impeachment trial. With that, the Mayorkas impeachment is over.