Mike Johnson Is Still Against Single-Party Impeachments. Unless He’s Leading One.
Michael Brochstein/ZUMA
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.House Speaker Mike Johnson believes in facts. “Facts are stubborn things, and they do not change,” he said this Sunday on Meet the Press. Neither does his stance on single-party impeachment, he would like us to believe.
“The founders of this country warned against the single-party impeachment,” he said in December 2019, as the House of Representatives moved forward with the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. “They feared it would bitterly and perhaps irreparably divide our nation.” Despite the fact that a Republican-led impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is imminent, Johnson said he stands by that statement.
WATCH: In 2019, Mike Johnson argued against impeaching then-President Trump, saying, “the founders of this country warned against single-party impeachments.”
On the verge of impeaching DHS Sec. Mayorkas, @kwelkernbc asks, “What changed, Mr. Speaker?”@SpeakerJohnson: “Nothin… pic.twitter.com/6PyT19XtSf
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) February 4, 2024
“Nothing, nothing has changed. I would repeat the same refrain over and over,” he told Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker. How is this impeachment different? According to Johnson, “The House has methodically, slowly, deliberately gone through the impeachment process, impeachment inquiry, impeachment investigation on Mayorkas.”
That’s one way of putting it, but another way, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, is that Republicans are scrambling to make the case to impeach Mayorkas:
As with previous congressional hearings and public attacks against the DHS secretary, the first official impeachment inquiry into Mayorkas once again exposed how legally weak Republicans’ case is. “They are angry that this administration won’t take babies from their moms or put kids in cages like the previous administration,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said, adding the “impeachment sham” wasn’t about facts or the law, but about politics. “You cannot impeach a cabinet secretary because you don’t like the president’s policies,” he continued.
Even some conservative legal scholars agree. Jonathan Turley, a legal analyst for Fox News, wrote in the Daily Beast on Monday that there is “no current evidence that [Mayorkas] is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense. He can be legitimately accused of effectuating an open border policy, but that is a disagreement on policy that is traced to the president.”
That disagreement on policy is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. In the same interview, Johnson refused to commit to hold a vote on the Senate’s upcoming bipartisan immigration bill, which Trump has been vocal about opposing.
