Senate Must Not Shirk Impeachment Responsibilities

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas:

"'[W]e do have a plan to address migration at the southern border. We're executing it… and we're starting to see the results.'

"Those are the words of the Secretary of Homeland Security after the Biden Administration had been in office for eight months.

"But in the past three years, they've taken on an altogether greater significance.

"The Administration's 'plan to address migration'?

"It turns out their plan was exactly what then-candidate Biden pledged on the debate stage: to surge migrants to the border!

"How'd they execute it? By slashing the previous Administration's commonsense border security policies. No more Remain in Mexico. No more border wall construction.

"As Secretary Mayorkas bragged back in 2021, the Biden Administration had repealed so many border enforcement tools that, 'it would take so much time to list them.'

"And how about that last part - 'we're starting to see the results'?

"Since this Administration took office, the surge in illegal arrivals at the southern border has set and broken new all-time records several times over.

"CBP personnel have worked overtime to contend with a humanitarian and security crisis. And yet for years, the Biden Administration's top concern about the border was not calling it a crisis.

"Again, '[W]e do have a plan to address migration at the southern border. We're executing it… and we're starting to see the results.'

"Results, indeed, Mr. President. In the form of a tragic, painful, and unnecessary crisis.

"Today it falls to the Senate to determine whether and to what extent Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas enabled and inflamed this crisis.

"Under the Constitution and the rules of impeachment, it is the job of this body to consider the articles of impeachment brought before us and to render judgment.

"The question right now should be how best to ensure that the charges on the table receive thorough consideration.

"But instead, the more pressing question is whether our Democratic colleagues intend to let the Senate work its will, at all.

"Tabling articles of impeachment would be unprecedented in the history of the Senate. It's as simple as that.

"Tabling would mean declining to discharge our duties as jurors.

"It would mean running both from our fundamental responsibility and from the glaring truth of the record-breaking crisis at our southern border.

"I, for one, intend to take my role as a juror in this case seriously. And I urge my colleagues to do the same."

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Permalink: https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2024/4/senate-must-not-shirk-impeachment-responsibilities