Credit: (Senate Television via AP)WASHINGTON – After a brief but bumpy Senate impeachment trial, Congress appears set to approve a surveillance program and nearly $100 billion in foreign aid, including to Ukraine, during rare weekend votes.
The Senate on Wednesday dismissed the two articles of impeachment the House brought against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in party-line votes of 51-48 and 51-49.
Republicans pushed for a full trial of Mayorkas, whom they accused of “willfully” refusing to enforce immigration laws, while Democrats maintained impeaching government officials over policy disagreements is an abuse of the impeachment process.
New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, both Democrats, voted to dismiss the charges.
House leaders formally presented the charges against Mayorkas on Tuesday, forcing the Senate to hear them promptly in an already busy week on Capitol Hill, where Congress has until Friday to authorize a surveillance program and is debating a multipart set of bills that includes aid for Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Taiwan.
The final approval of that series of bills, which the White House has endorsed, could come this weekend.
Where NJ House members lined up
In February, the House voted narrowly to impeach Mayorkas — the first Cabinet secretary since the Civil War to be impeached.
New Jersey’s House members voted along party lines on the impeachment, with Democrats voting against and the state’s three Republicans, Reps. Jeff Van Drew, Chris Smith and Tom Kean, in favor of impeachment.
“He took an oath to protect the Constitution, the safety of Americans,” Van Drew said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News on Tuesday night. “I really think he’s not obeying the law of the land.”
Van Drew noted the Senate would not convict Mayorkas. “You still sometimes have to do something and stand for something, and this is one of those cases,” Van Drew said.
To remove Mayorkas from office would have required two-thirds of senators, or 67, to vote for conviction, a bar extremely unlikely to be reached even with a trial.
Menendez, Booker vote to dismiss
Senators were sworn in as jurors starting at 1:29 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. Called alphabetically by last name, they signed an oath book kept in the National Archives.
After Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and his party’s leader in the chamber, moved to dismiss the charges, confusion set in over what should happen next under procedure.
Menendez sat at his desk, toward the front of the Senate, chatting with Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Booker milled about and snuck what appeared to be candy — contraband during Senate impeachment trials, along with electronic devices and beverages other than water or milk. Reporters in the press gallery, visitors in their galleries and staffers around the chamber, filled with all 100 senators — an unusual sight during day-to-day operations of and votes in the Senate — were quiet.
The stentorian voice of Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, carried across the room, where a library-like quiet had set in. “Can you explain,” he asked his colleagues, “what procedurally is going on?”
Eventually, the apolitical staff members who advise senators on Senate process guided the lawmakers about what to do, and Republicans filed a series of motions to keep the charges against Mayorkas alive. But those votes failed, and the trial process was over within hours.
The impeachment trial was the third in five years. The House impeached former President Donald Trump twice, first for allegedly trying to use Ukraine as a conduit to blackmail President Joe Biden and in 2021 for inciting a coup attempt that culminated in an attack on the Capitol.
Thomas Porteous, a former federal judge who took bribes while on duty, was the most recent person to be impeached and convicted. A Louisiana judge, Porteous was removed from office in 2010.
Mayorkas testified at a Senate hearing about his department’s budget Thursday morning.
