PRESS RELEASE Contact: press@congressionalintegrity.org
For Immediate Release
Date: January 29, 2024
Washington, DC – Today, Joshua Matz, counsel in the first and second impeachments of former President Trump, and co-author (with Larry Tribe) of “To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment,” Hannah Muldavin, senior communications advisor, Congressional Integrity Project, and former spokesperson for the January 6th House Select Committee, and Brad Woodhouse, senior advisor, Congressional Integrity Project joined a virtual press briefing to discuss the baseless, unconstitutional impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and what can be done to make sure MAGA Republicans are held accountable.
Despite being in charge of the House of Representatives for over a year, MAGA Republicans have done nothing to help solve the problems of our broken and outdated immigration system. Rather than coming to the table to craft a bipartisan solution, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson have happily done Donald Trump’s bidding, walking away from negotiations so Trump can continue campaigning on the ongoing crisis. This impeachment attempt is nothing but a blatant pre-planned and predetermined political stunt designed to hurt President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas, and the current administration and help Donald Trump return to the White House in 2024.
“The Constitution imposed rules and standards designed to make sure that the use of the impeachment power didn’t get out of hand. And what we’re seeing now is the trampling of those very limitations,” said Joshua Matz, co-author, and counsel in the impeachments of Donald Trump. “What we see in the Articles of Impeachment that the House Republicans have brought forward is a flagrant disregard of legal principles that have been settled in this country essentially since the founding. There have been a number of public statements and public letters on a bipartisan basis from constitutional experts and from former officials at the Department of Homeland Security, expressing strongly the view that this impeachment is unwarranted as a matter of constitutional law.”
“There are facts that have largely been ignored by some of these MAGA House Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee, and in Congress as a whole. They have ignored the advice of bipartisan legal scholars like Joshua. Groups of people like the Cuban American bipartisan group who wrote in the Miami Herald supporting Secretary Mayorkas. We saw an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by DHS Secretary under President Bush, Secretary Chertoff, who said that Republicans are misusing the process to target an official who has done nothing wrong. We’ve also seen fellow GOP members who have said that they don’t believe that Secretary Mayorkas is guilty of high crimes or misdemeanors,” said Hannah Muldavin, senior communications advisor to the Congressional Integrity Project and former spokesperson for the January 6th House Select Committee. “There is no evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors. This is unconstitutional, as Joshua mentioned, which means that this is all a political stunt.”
“This is an impeachment that has been demanded by MAGA, demanded by Trump, demanded by Marjorie Taylor Greene,” said Brad Woodhouse, senior advisor to the Congressional Integrity Project. “This goes beyond policy differences. We know that because there is a bipartisan, negotiated deal on the table that includes a lot of policies that Republicans have said they favor for border security, and that the President said he would sign. But Republicans are walking away from that deal. Donald Trump told Republicans in the House two things that we know on border and immigration: 1) impeach Mayorkas, and 2) walk away from any deal to fix the border because of his fear that it would help Joe Biden. It is pure, partisan presidential politics at its worst. It’s bullshit.”
Watch the full press briefing here.
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