WEST SULPHUR SPRINGS, West Virginia — It’s been over a month since the House voted to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, but the Senate likely won’t consider a trial for the homeland secretary until lawmakers can square away their 2024 budget.
The House cast its historic vote to impeach Mayorkas on Feb. 13, charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors related to his handling of the southern border. However, the articles of impeachment have not yet been transferred over to the Senate for a trial, which Democrats are likely to dismiss quickly.
“We’ve not sent it over yet,” Johnson told reporters at the annual House GOP retreat at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia on Thursday. “And the very simple answer for that and the reason for it is because we’re in the middle of funding the government in the appropriations process.”
Johnson’s comments come just over a week before the next spending deadline of March 22, on which federal funding for a slate of government agencies is set to lapse unless some sort of spending deal is passed.
Congress averted a shutdown for six of its 12 annual appropriations bills last week but must now consider the remainder, among them funding for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.
Once articles of impeachment are transferred to the Senate, lawmakers are required to begin consideration at 1 p.m. the next day, according to impeachment rules. Because of this short window and the coinciding government shutdown deadlines, the process has been largely delayed, the speaker said.
“We didn’t want to interrupt the Senate in their floor time and their deliberation on appropriations because we would have risked shutting the government down,” Johnson said. “It will be done in due course as soon as we wrap that process up.”
House lawmakers are still negotiating how to combine those appropriations bills into a spending package, referred to as a “minibus,” that would advance the legislation in a single vote. Lawmakers are aiming to get legislative text finalized sometime over the weekend to tee up a vote next week.
Even with those bills out of the way, it remains unclear when the Mayorkas impeachment trial could begin in the upper chamber.
House impeachment managers held their first meeting last month to discuss a path forward, telling the Washington Examiner they want to ensure a full trial in the Senate will take place before handing off the articles. Democratic leaders in the Senate, who consider the charges against Mayorkas to be political, have indicated plans to dismiss Mayorkas’s trial as quickly as possible.
There are several avenues Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) could take to dismiss the trial, including a vote to throw out the charges altogether. Democrats could also refer the matter to a special committee or raise a point of special order to quash the effort to convict.
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“We want to not give them an excuse to do anything else,” Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said last month. “So our goal is to just kind of negotiate with them and kind of figure out what they’re going to do before we send them up.”
Even if the Senate does conduct a full trial for Mayorkas, the top border official is likely to be acquitted by the Democratic majority. A conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority vote, which would require more than a dozen Democrats to join Republicans to remove him from office.