OXON HILL, Md. – Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., is weighing in on which Biden administration officials, in addition to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he thinks have engaged in questionable activity worth investigating and why.
“The thing about Secretary Mayorkas, first, is that he’s just utterly flouted American immigration law,” Bishop, a member of the House Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees, told The Daily Signal at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, on Saturday.
“There’s a laundry list of statutes that he has explicitly disobeyed,” he argued. “That is high crimes and misdemeanors. You got to build consensus within a Republican conference. Some want to use a light touch on these things all the time. A lot of people say, ‘Well, if we can’t, we’re not assured that the Senate will convict, and it’s in Democrat hands, why would we do any of it?'”
“There are reasons to do it, but we’ve got a process to go through, marshal the evidence, conduct the hearings in public and, if it leads in the direction and all the evidence adds up when you’ve done it in a real rigorous way like that, do you move forward with impeachment? I think so,” he explained.
Bishop also suggested impeaching President Joe Biden and other cabinet secretaries.
He noted that The Daily Signal asked if he thinks Congress should launch impeachment inquiries into anyone else.
“It’s a matter of degree and political judgment when you exercise the remedy of impeachment. But it goes right to President Biden. I mean, and I’m not, I think none of us are unaware of that,” he said. “There are those who would question whether or not it is a good expenditure of political capital to, for example, pursue an impeachment inquiry against President Biden.”
“I can name a long list of things that he’s done that are fundamentally unconstitutional: the vaccine mandate,” along with “the rent subsidies and the moratorium on landlords back in the pandemic that he extended,” Bishop said. He also mentioned the potential treaty between the U.S. and the World Health Organization, and its impact on national and state sovereignty.
Bishop added:
There are things that Biden has flouted law also over and over, and you can take any number of his cabinet secretaries and say the same thing applies.
I think the important thing about Mayorkas one is it’s one of the clearest, most obvious, most recalcitrant, most brazen examples of defiance of law in a role where he’s required to execute law with the results that are most dramatic, compelling and destructive to the American people, the very fabric of our society. He’s a good place to start. Where it goes? I don’t really say there’s a limit to that.
Republican lawmakers have called for impeaching Mayorkas for many reasons, notably for allegedly lying under oath to Congress, intentionally making the border less secure, opening the border for political gain, and for sparking a humanitarian crisis.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., first introduced articles of impeachment against Mayorkas in August 2021, when the Arizona lawmaker was chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. On Feb. 1, Biggs filed new articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, saying in a press release that Mayorkas “is the chief architect of the migration and drug invasion at our southern border.”
The House Judiciary Committee has held three hearings on the border crisis since the beginning of the year, and the Homeland Security Committee recently held a hearing entitled “Every State Is a Border State: Examining Secretary Mayorkas’ Border Crisis.”
The Judiciary Committee has not announced a date for the Mayorkas impeachment hearing, but sources on Capitol Hill indicate that a hearing will likely take place this year. The Homeland Security Committee is set to hold a field hearing on March 15 in McAllen, Texas.
Officials have encountered more than 1 million migrants at the southern border just since fiscal year 2023 began on Oct. 1, The Daily Signal previously reported.
Customs and Border Protection sources confirmed to Fox News that migrants attempting to cross the border into the U.S. reached 1,008,217 as of Feb. 24. “Of those, 87.8% were single adults,” Fox reported. “Just 328,454 were expelled under Title 42—the pandemic-era protocol that allows border agents to rapidly expel border crossers.”
The number of illegal immigrant encounters at the border over the past five months is nearly double the population of Wyoming, or equal to the population of President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware.
The White House and the Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comments.
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Virginia Allen contributed to this report.
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