Last Call For Border Line Insanity, Con't

House Republicans, supremely confident that they will take control of the House in January, are promising to impeach President Biden and basically every cabinet official in hearing after hearing after hearing until Democrats just throw the towel in and abandon the administration, I guess. They've already promised to go after Biden, AG Merrick Garland, and VP Kamala Harris, and now House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has it in for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy will be swiftly confronted in a Republican majority with a politically dicey proposition gaining steam within his conference: Launching impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden’s top official in charge of the southern border.

Senior Republicans and a number of McCarthy allies are signaling little appetite – for now – in immediately impeaching Biden himself, despite the push among a handful of far-right Republicans seeking to remove the sitting President from office if their party takes the House in next month’s midterms.

But more than a dozen of former President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies – and several Republicans close to the leadership – told CNN that the focus instead should be on targeting Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and that a new GOP majority should hold impeachment proceedings over the problems at the border. Senior GOP sources close to leadership say it’s a matter of when – not if – House Republicans initiate an impeachment inquiry and that Mayorkas has become their No. 1 target, with their base itching for revenge after Trump’s two impeachments.

Impeaching a Cabinet official has only happened once in US history, and the issue would become moot if Mayorkas were to resign. But talk of impeaching Mayorkas already has prompted internal pushback among some veteran Republicans who are skeptical that their policy disputes with the Cabinet secretary meet the bar of charging him with committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Yet as they have railed over the migrant crisis in their push to regain the House, a number of leading Republicans fully endorse the idea and acknowledge it’s one that McCarthy will have to deal with if he wins the speakership following the midterms.

“Mayorkas deserves (impeachment) for sure, because we no longer have a border,” said Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a McCarthy ally who is in line to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee, which oversees impeachment proceedings.

But while Jordan personally supports the idea, he believes it will be “a conference decision,” saying, “I think we’ll all sit down. Kevin is open to sitting down and figuring out what we do.”

Added Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a freshman GOP firebrand who has already endorsed impeachment articles for both Biden and Mayorkas: “Secretary Mayorkas should be a priority. Joe Biden’s his own demise.”

Yet McCarthy must also contend with a larger yet less vocal group of moderate and mainstream Republicans, who are wary of the potential political blowback over such a move and warning their colleagues not to weaponize the most powerful oversight tool at their disposal.

GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said Republicans “should focus on policy” and “leave some of the other more emotional topics for another day.”

“The risk is if people lose faith in the ability of Congress to even do its basic function,” Womack said of voter blowback for impeaching Mayorkas. “The people that I talk to from all stripes tell me they want a Congress that works – not a Congress that is preoccupied with kind of revenge-type agendas. Because then a lot of other things (that) need to happen don’t get to happen. And then that hurts the country.”

 

McCarthy being Speaker of the House being beside the point, I don't think the odds of this are as good as both CNN and the GOP are telling you, the notion that whoever is leading the GOP in January won't be impeaching Biden officials for all of 2023 is laughable. Of course these idiots will waste America's time and work to ruin the economy, and vastly overplay their hand. That's a given.

Perhaps then the point of this story is to convince the people who think impeaching Biden's cabinet on Day One might be a bad idea to vote for the Dems.

I certainly think that this would be a solution.

The Coup-Coup Birds Come Home To Roost, Con't

If you thought FOX News incendiary device and "he of the perpetually fish-slapped visage" Tucker Carlson wasn't already a white supremacist seditionist, that was before Joe Biden was sworn in, which has apparently pushed Carlson over yet another edge hurtling toward fomenting mass violence against the American government. His opening Biden hate rant Wednesday night was something else, even by his abysmal standards:

Rather than answer our questions or improve our lives, you're bringing in people with guns to remind us that you are in charge, and dissent is illegal. That's a big change. You may have thought you were a decent American in good standing.

Ten years ago, nobody in this country would have called your views extreme. They weren't extreme then. You don't think they're extreme now. You've always considered yourself a pretty moderate person. Live your life and get along with others. That's not possible now, because the rules have changed.

You are now a dangerous insurgent. You are no different from a bloodthirsty Pashtun in Helmand Province, or an ISIS terrorist in Erbil. You're part of a guerrilla insurgency.

 

And at this point, the next implied sentence, "So if they are going to treat you as a domestic terrorist, maybe you should use terrorist tactics, methods, and weapons", is loud enough for even the dead to hear. It's certainly loud enough for Republicans in the Senate to hear, blocking the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security Secretary.

Senate Republicans plan to object to any efforts to quickly confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of Homeland Security, further delaying his confirmation as the department grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic, national security concerns and President Joe Biden's ambitious immigration plans. 

In confirming the GOP's plans to filibuster, Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill that "there's a number of problems" with Mayorkas' nomination. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has pushed to have Mayorkas confirmed quickly, but Cornyn and other Senate Republicans argue that Mayorkas hasn't been properly vetted on immigration issues and are calling for an additional hearing into his nomination. The Senate has scheduled a procedural vote to break the filibuster at 1:45 p.m. ET Thursday. 

After the Senate breaks the filibuster -- which requires 51 votes -- the final confirmation vote will be Monday evening. 

The use of the filibuster -- to stall nominations or legislation -- has long been a favored tool of the minority party, something Schumer did often when trying to derail and delay the Republican agenda under then-President Donald Trump. In recent days, continued use of the filibuster on legislation became a central sticking point over a resolution that would allow the 50-50 Senate to officially organize, but the stall tactic is unlikely to be gutted further in this Congress because of resistance from some moderate Democrats. 

The Senate Homeland Security Committee held an extensive hearing into Mayorkas' qualifications to lead the department last week and voted Tuesday to move Mayorkas' nomination forward.

 

Republicans are really, really going out of their way to delay Mayorkas getting into his role as DHS Secretary, almost like they are trying to buy time to stop the truth from coming out about January 6th, and giving their followers additional time to possibly disrupt things further...

 

But that's just paranoia talking.

 

Right?