House Democrats are calling for centrist Republicans to scuttle the impeachment process against President Joe Biden‘s secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

House Homeland Security Committee Democrats unveiled their plan in a call late Tuesday and explained how they will appeal to Republicans’ better judgment as action gets underway on Capitol Hill Wednesday to remove Mayorkas for his handling of the southern border.

“House Republicans are operating with a slim majority and I am operating under the assumption that there are at least some of them that take their oath to the Constitution seriously, and hopefully there are enough of them that are serious about upholding the Constitution that this will fail,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI). “I do think and I do hope that there are some congressional Republicans left who care.”

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) said Republican votes on how to handle Mayorkas could have long-term implications come November.

“There’s a lot of Republicans though, in moderate districts, in fact, Biden districts, I think that they’re going to have a tougher calculation to make on this,” Ivey said. “Hopefully the voters will punish them for, you know, abusing the system in this way, and really putting the Constitution at risk.”

A three-hour hearing on Capitol Hill will begin Wednesday morning with lawmakers questioning a panel of witnesses, three state attorneys general who will speak to the impact of illegal immigration on states.

Republicans are not expected to hold back and tempers could flare as the GOP attempts to build a case that Mayorkas has been derelict in his duties to protect the American people.

A Republican committee aide told the Washington Examiner that it will “take up” impeachment articles in the coming weeks.

“This week’s hearing will be the first step in this process, and we anticipate additional hearings to come,” the committee aide wrote in an email. “At the end of this process, the Committee will mark up articles of impeachment.”

Mayorkas’s impeachment is contingent on near-unanimous GOP support. House Republicans now have a 220-213 majority that will get slimmer with Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) stepping down this month and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) unable to attend January votes for further cancer treatment.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) said there is no legal basis for Congress to take such a vote.

“This is simply a policy dispute, a disagreement about how a different party is attacking a policy problem. And the Republicans are trying to abuse their power and the Constitution to convert what is simply a disagreement into somehow, some way, a high crime and misdemeanor,” Goldman said. “There is no crime, much less a high crime or misdemeanor here. It’s not even clear at all what the crime is that they’re alleging. Derelection of duty is not a crime. It is a military concept.”

The situation has been years in the making. Mayorkas was confirmed by the Senate in January 2021 just as President Joe Biden took office. In that time, Biden has issued more than 400 executive actions on immigration matters and walked back Trump administration policies.

Since Biden’s first full month in office, the number of immigrants encountered after crossing the border illegally has skyrocketed, setting monthly records only to be broken month after month, including last month when 302,000 immigrants were encountered at the southern border.

Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) backed the strategy of investigating Mayorkas before going down the political path of impeachment, which is doomed to fail in the Senate given Democrats’ majority.

In 2023, fresh off the November 2022 win, incoming House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) charted the committee’s course, which included 15 border-focused hearings and five that were focused on digging into Mayorkas.

As the border crisis reached new records and McCarthy was ousted as speaker, Republicans have become more adamant about holding the Biden administration accountable. New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has charged forward with a formal vote on a Biden impeachment inquiry but also greenlit impeachment hearings for Mayorkas in response to demands from his razor-thin majority.

On Monday, Johnson released a list of 64 times the Biden administration “intentionally undermined border security,” as the GOP builds momentum heading into Wednesday.

But not all conservatives are in agreement over the decision to pursue Mayorkas through more hearings in 2024, even if it ends with a House vote to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors. Additionally, Democrats are outright against the move, in part, because of how many hearings have already occurred.

Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s border security and immigration center in Washington, said the committee’s intention of putting Mayorkas’s “betrayal” on display for the public is “surely worth the effort,” but has a downside.

“I understand the outrage feeding both the Mayorkas and Biden impeachment efforts, though I don’t know how much political capital there is to carry either through,” Hankinson wrote in an email.

The impeachment effort could end up hurting Republicans, Hankinson said, as they also try to simultaneously navigate Senate supplemental funding negotiations and a possible government shutdown.

Democrats said the investigative hearings have occurred in place of bipartisan negotiations in the House to come up with a long-term border and immigration policy. Republicans have worked with one another on one such proposal, H.R. 2, but kept Democrats out of the process.

A senior House Democratic aide described the upcoming hearing as nothing more than a rehash of similar hearings the committee held last year. The aide said Democrats had been under the impression that this particular hearing with the attorneys general was supposed to take place last November or December, but was held up for reasons unknown.

The move to impeach Mayorkas now gives House Republicans a new public target as they try to gather documents and closed-door interviews to build an impeachment case against Biden related to his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

“No matter how many of the same hearings Republicans hold over and over again, nothing they have done this past year has changed the fact that the extreme MAGA Republican effort to impeach Secretary Mayorkas — led by Marjorie Taylor Greene – is completely baseless,” Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. 

Thompson, the committee chairman before Republicans retook the House in 2023, applauded Mayorkas for “faithfully” carrying out his job amid the impeachment effort.

“He negotiates with Senate Republicans and Democrats to get much-needed resources to the border. Meanwhile, House Republicans have been completely AWOL,” said Thompson. “This extreme MAGA impeachment scheme is nothing more than a political stunt without any foundation in the Constitution. These hearings are not part of any legitimate investigation – they’re an extreme MAGA spectacle.”