Democrats are “afraid” to hold a Senate impeachment trial for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas because the evidence will showcase the disaster at the open border, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley says.
Mayorkas became the first sitting Cabinet secretary in history to be impeached by the House in February.
Asked if he thinks his Democrat colleagues in the Senate would vote to convict and remove Mayorkas if the evidence warrants it, Hawley said succinctly and surely, “No. No, I don’t.”
The reason, he said in an exclusive interview Thursday with The Heartlander, is the overwhelming evidence itself of Mayorkas’s wanton, apparently purposeful negligence in his sacred duty to secure the homeland. Democrats, Hawley argues, don’t want a blinding impeachment spotlight turned on that historic dereliction of duty.
“They don’t even want to vote to acquit him. I mean, get this: they don’t want to vote at all. They are so afraid of what might come out of the trial. And we know what’s going to come out of the trial: that the border is overrun, that drugs are pouring into Missouri and every other state in the country, that violent criminals have come across the border and are killing people in every state in the country – 9 million Illegals, maybe 10, while Joe Biden has been president.
“They are so afraid of that that they’re going to try to get rid of the trial altogether and not do anything – not vote to acquit, nothing. It is a total travesty, and it’s all about covering up the crime of the open border.”
Fox News has reported as many as a dozen Republican senators “are gearing up to prevent all legislative business in the Senate from going forward if they don’t get a full trial.”
Hawley is certainly sympathetic to the sentiment, but is skeptical it could work.
“At the end of the day, the Democrats only need 51 votes in order to dispense with the trial – which would be totally unconstitutional, can I just say. The Constitution says the Senate shall try impeachment cases. It doesn’t say ‘the Senate shall ignore,’ or ‘the Senate shall table’ or ‘the Senate shall look the other way.’
“But that’s what the Democrats want to do, and under the rules of the Senate if you’ve got 51 votes you can do about anything.”
Hawley may have good reason to avoid grinding the legislative body to a halt anyway: He’s still fighting to win approval for his seemingly quixotic quest to extend and expand compensation for continued victims of radiation in Missouri and nationally.
His bill to extend and expand the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), set to expire June 7, has been passed twice by the Senate but is currently languishing in the House. As an alternative, Hawley is looking at pairing the bill in the Senate with a tax bill making its way through Congress, albeit lethargically.
RECA might just make the tax bill more palatable to senators, he figures. The bill would preserve and grow compensation for victims of shoddily-contained nuclear waste left behind by the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs in the WWII and Cold War eras.
The victims in Missouri, he notes, have never even been included in the compensation, despite the tragic Show-Me State stories he’s highlighted for his colleagues in Congress and the media flowing from waste buried in the St. Louis region.
“Well, my observation is this tax bill, which would expand the child tax credit, is just not going anywhere in the Senate,” Hawley explains. “RECA passed with [nearly] 70 votes. So, if they want to get the tax bill passed through the Senate and the House, my suggestion is they pair up RECA with it. And that would be good for RECA, because it would give the House yet another opportunity to pass the RECA bill.”
Ultimately, though, all RECA really needs is approval in the House. Has Hawley pressed the issue with Speaker Mike Johnson?
“Yes. Yes, the speaker, the majority leader – I’ve talked to anybody and everybody who will listen. I’ve just reminded him [that] come June, this whole program expires. If that happens, Missouri gets nothing. No other victim in any other state gets a dime. People who have depended on this program for lifesaving compensation after being exposed, poisoned by their government, they will get nothing.
“So really, it’s on the House to act now. The Senate has passed this bill twice in the last six months, seven months. The House has got to do it.
“Bottom line, end of the day, the House is going to have to act. They’re going to have to pass the RECA bill in order for Missouri to get what it deserves – for the victims in Missouri, and millions of other Americans, to be compensated by the government.
“Right now, the House is doing nothing. I mean, they’re really doing nothing on anything. But they’re certainly doing nothing for radiation victims in Missouri. They need to get with it right now.”
