The House's impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was a months-long process, but the Senate might take just days to reject it. Sources tell the New York Times that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn't decided exactly how to deal with the impeachment, but House managers plan to deliver the articles of impeachment on Feb. 28 and proceedings could be over by the end of the month, which has 29 days this year. Mayorkas still has his job and removing him would require a conviction by a two-thirds majority, meaning 18 Democrats would have to vote with Republicans.
House Republicans are calling for the Senate to hold a full trial, but some of their Senate counterparts aren't as keen. "If I could use the House term: It'll be dead on arrival when it comes over," Republican Sen. James Lankford, who worked with Mayorkas on the bipartisan border deal, said last week. The articles of impeachment accuse Mayorkas, a Democrat, of a "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law." Critics, including some GOP senators, say the charges don't amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors." Analysts say Senate leaders have multiple options for dealing with the impeachment, including a swift dismissal.
The options include "holding an extremely truncated trial—with the option to vote to dismiss after the House managers present their case, again with the Senate deciding how long they have to do so," Casey Burgat, director of the Legislative Affairs program at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, tells the Washington Post. Alternatively, Burgat says, they could create "an evidentiary committee to consider the case—which they can slowplay until after the election or through the entire Congress so the Senate never is forced to deal with the actual vote to convict." (More Alejandro Mayorkas stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
