Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has called out Republicans for their “laughable” attempt to impeach a Cabinet official for the first time in U.S. history, saying that their accusations against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas clearly lack any form of evidence and are merely politically motivated.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said that there were multiple reasons that the impeachment vote failed on Tuesday night, with four Republicans joining Democrats in voting “no”: the inexperience of the party’s fourth-choice House speaker, as well as the baseless nature of the allegations.
“Republicans are dealing with not their first choice speaker, not their second choice speaker, not their third choice speaker. They are dealing with the speaker that they could get and that they could agree on. And that means an individual that does not have experience in party leadership,” she said.
“You’re also dealing with the fact that this is an impeachment without merit. Secretary Mayorkas has demonstrated no — there is absolutely no evidence for an impeachable offense. It is completely politicized,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.
She went on to say that it’s not even politically expedient for Republicans to pursue the impeachment vote: “It imperils the Republicans’ own swing district members to force a vote on something so clearly craven and without merit.”
This has indeed been an embarrassing week for House Republicans, reaching a stalemate on several major far right priorities with the chamber on track overall to be the most unproductive session in decades due to Republican chaos. In a way, their inability to pass the impeachment and a bill to grant $18 billion in funding to Israel, as well as their decision to oppose a draconian right-wing immigration package, is a gift to Democrats and progressives who oppose the proposals due to their contents.
Still, it is a show of the fractures within the Republican Party even as conservative Democrats attempt to lend them a hand by negotiating with them. On the immigration measures in particular, it is also a show of the GOP’s seeming willingness to use the lives of immigrants and asylum seekers as a bludgeon to hurt Democrats — who are already exercising a deep level of inhumanity toward migrants — in order to advance their own nightmarish and even more fascist concepts of border policy.
With Mayorkas’s impeachment, Republicans had argued that the manufactured “border crisis” is confirmation that Mayorkas hasn’t been performing his duties as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, a claim with no evidence. At the same time, as conservative Democrats have handed the GOP an assortment of inhumane proposals — like making it harder for people to seek asylum or widening abilities for the administration to turn asylum seekers away at the border — that they say would assuage xenophobic anxieties about immigration, Republicans have turned them down, seeking instead to stall until their party can claim sole credit.
On MSNBC, Ocasio-Cortez said that a point often lost in corporate coverage of and political debates over immigration is that evidence shows that more gracious and humane immigration policy can be beneficial for countries as a whole. A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office found that the U.S. economy is expected to grow by $7 trillion in the next decade due in large part to increases in immigration.
“It is actually completely nonsensical that we do not talk about the enormous blessing, economic blessing that immigrants and immigration represents to the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Countries with anti, or more kind of closed border policies, experience economic stagnation when they submit themselves to this xenophobic border panic narrative that Fox News frankly seeks to peddle and instill in so many people.”
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