Feb. 14, 2024 - Mayorkas impeached

… Historic impeachment … Surveillance bill … Presidential age-limits? … Jackie Robinson statue …

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House GOP Impeaches Jewish, Cuban Refugee Son of Holocaust Survivor

For the first time since 1876, the House of Representatives voted yesterday to impeach a presidential cabinet member for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Homeland [sic] Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached on two counts: Violating immigration statutes by failing to detain more undocumented immigrants as required by law, and lying to Congress for calling the border secure.

The House will now send a team of impeachment managers to present their case to the Senate, where it will lose due to being bullshit and due to the two-thirds margin required to pass said bullshit.

The House vote was 214-213. Two Democrats — who would have voted against impeachment — missed the vote. Three Republicans voted against impeaching Mayorkas, making the impeachment vote partisan and the vote against bipartisan.

THE CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT I mean, Mayorkas did do the stuff he’s accused of. Sure, he had reasons for not detaining every single undocumented migrant he could find. Good, non-corrupt reasons.

And when he told Congress the border was “secure,” that was true in the sense that any normal person would accept. But it wasn’t literally true since we don’t have a Logan’s Run dome to stop every Latino Run across the border.

So why did all those legal experts say Mayorkas didn’t merit impeachment if he really was technically guilty? Basically, because his conduct was entirely within the norms of both parties. Not shockingly, since Republicans literally campaign on stopping the government from doing its job, Republican cabinet members fail to do their jobs far more egregiously.

In fact, cabinet-level failure to enforce the law against known law-breakers is so common there’s a name for it: Regulatory capture. How about D4FRFP¹ Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency secretaries? Anyone think they did their jobs? Education Secretary [for real, look it up!] Betsy DeVos?

Anyone think Trump Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue fully enforced laws protecting organic dairy farmers from big, industrial firms? I don’t.

Hell, even if Republicans weren’t willing to hold Trump cabinet secretaries accountable, there were other Democratic targets besides Mayorkas. How about Attorney General Merrick Garland, who failed to indict Trump for insurrection and failed to prosecute the undocumented tourists who literally invaded Congress and explicitly said they were there to do crimes?

In that context, the House GOP singling out Mayorkas was like pulling one guy over for doing 56 even when others were pushing 90. MPH and years.

THE MISSING DEMS Democrats could have defeated impeachment again, but two of them were absent. Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) said she couldn’t attend because she has COVID. So that’s obviously Pres. Joe Biden’s fault (I mean, hundreds of people still die from it every week!) but if you wanna blame a Republican, you can fault then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who did away with remote voting after Trump cured COVID.

Then there’s Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL). Her excuse? Her flight was delayed. So, obviously, that’s on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who some people think I hate because I revealed his dirty, dirty secrets. In reality, you really can’t fault Buttigieg here, and not just because we have no idea whether it’s his fault or capitalism’s that the flight was delayed.

The real reason we can’t blame Buttigieg? A Republican member of Congress was on the same flight, so Buttigieg merely canceled out the two votes.

ANCIENT HISTORY The last cabinet member to be impeached was Secretary of War (that’s what we called it before the Secretary of Marketing got a hold of it) William Belknap. And Belknap was so bad that he was impeached for taking $20,000 in kickbacks. Doesn’t sound like a lot? His annual salary was $8,000! (This was before Bidenflation.)

Belknap was so guilty that he raced to the White House just before the vote, told President Ulysses S. Grant he was resigning and then burst into tears as Grant tenderly held him and brushed the hair from his shining eyes. (Belknap’s resignation means Mayorkas’s impeachment is technically the first-ever impeachment of a sitting cabinet member.)

THE LESS-ANCIENT HISTORY It’s not just impeachment that’s making modern-day history. Mayorkas is a historic figure himself, and some Republicans might be history on Election Day for voting to impeach him, given the constituencies he represents.

He’s Jewish. He’s Cuban. He’s a Cuban refugee brought here as a child when his parents fled Fidel Castro’s revolution. His mother’s from Romania, and fled as a child to escape the Holocaust.

And Mayorkas became a prosecutor: Law enforcement. He was first hired as a federal prosecutor under Pres. George H.W. Bush, a Republican, prosecuting Latinos in California. Mexicans! The literal Cali cartel! Actual drug dealers!

A Cuban, Jewish prosecutor who jailed Latino drug dealers checks so many GOP boxes that Mayorkas should be inspiring countless sweaty nights of sad, fleeting, Republican Party self-pleasure. But nooo…

Mayorkas’s days were probably numbered the moment he decided to prosecute white supremacists in 2000. Which was too soon.

You might have thought Mayorkas redeemed himself in Republican eyes after targeting the Mexican mafia and money-launderers for the Cali cartel. But nooo… 

And along the way, Mayorkas committed the unforgivable sin. He wasn’t a monster.

That was his rep even in the U.S. attorney’s office back in California. Compassion. Fairness. Mayorkas put Heidi Fleiss in prison and she still had a crush on him!

So yesterday it didn’t matter that Mayorkas is assimilated as fuck. That he signed on with the establishment. That he kept his nose clean. 

He had empathy. Which made him an accomplice. In the narrative Republicans will present to the Senate, after decades of nailing non-white criminals and white-shoe law-firm jobs, Mayorkas apparently developed a taste for Los Pollos Hermanos… breaking bad to assist an invasion of Latinos of all kinds; drug dealers and rapists.

Among the multiple ironies here, this impeachment at Trump’s behest for failing to stop a fictional invasion comes right as Trump said he might decide not to enforce the international treaty that would require him to stop a real Russian invasion of our allies. Also among the multiple ironies here, the migrant “invasion” is at least in part due to Republican donors giving jobs to the “invaders.” 

And even more also among the multiple ironies here, a huge part of the reason we’re getting this “invasion” is that Republicans are methodically turning the home countries of the invaders into hellholes, forcing them to flee. 

None of that matters, of course. No matter what the norms are, no matter how perfectly you conform to the alleged mold for the American dream, no matter how much you assimilate, no matter how well you serve your country, no matter how high you rise, they’ll still pull you over and ask for your papers.

Surveillance Bill Has Unwarranted Lack of Warrants

The House Rules Committee today will consider what rules the House will have to follow while considering a new bill to reauthorize U.S. surveillance of you and me but mostly you. (You know what you did.)

As written, the bill does not add a warrant requirement — meaning if it passes as is, the FBI will continue to be able to gather your filthy texts and emails without a warrant. Because why should undocumented migrants be the only ones denied due process?

A full vote could come as soon as tomorrow. And right on cue, the FBI showed up with proof — proof, I tells ya! — that warrants love terrorism. The FBI showed Politico documents indicating that warrantless searches … let’s call ‘em unwarranted … were vital to preventing a “potentially imminent terrorist attack” last year. “Potentially imminent,” of course, is fear-speak for “maybe not imminent.”

“The big point here is the warrant requirement and how damaging that would potentially be,” according to an FBI official who told Politico that requiring warrants would hamper their ability to keep America a free country, where government officials can’t simply search your shit without a warrant. The official was not named because that could compromise the FBI’s ability to ensure we don’t become a country where we have unnamed government officials.

Without a new bill, the surveillance authority will expire in April… is how the objective media are reporting it. Also objective: “Without a new bill, freedom from unwarranted government surveillance will return in April.”

Pres. Joe Biden opposes a warrant requirement, because he’s fighting to save democracy. Disconcertingly enough, some MAGA House members want to slap a warrant requirement on the FBI, which is probably less about the rights of you and me but mostly you and probably more about not wanting to give unchecked surveillance power to the federal agency that stole the Super Bowl.

Presidential Age Issue Won’t Die

The debate over presidential age is showing serious signs of dementia. Observers had thought that the age debate had reached its final days, but it’s now displaying renewed vigor. Still, there are indications that the debate is forgetting basic things like the fact that we’ve known how old Pres. Joe Biden and D4FRFP Donald Trump are since at least 2016, if not before.

In addition, there are troubling signs of cognitive decline.

In a Democratic Senate primary debate on Monday, Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) said the nation ought to consider imposing age limits on the presidency. Porter, who’s old enough to know better, is currently running for an office she was once gender-limited from holding due to well-known and widespread female hysteria diagnosed by doctors who were not experiencing cognitive decline.

Porter’s remarks came the same night that Jon Stewart used his return to The Daily Show to talk about the same thing all the other talking heads are talking about because omg what do you want them to talk about? How the Commodity Futures Trading Commission could bring down inflation tomorrow? Grow up yo.

Crime Watch

JACKIE ROBINSON STATUE Police in Wichita, KS, now say that the dismemberment and theft of a bronze Jackie Robinson statue was not a hate crime. And that’s not because police in Wichita, KS, don’t believe in hate crimes. They say it was an economic crime.

The 45-year-old guy they’ve charged with the theft is instead accused of wanting to sell the statue as scrap metal. And people say there’s no intersection between identity and economic issues!

But, look, even if I’m at all sympathetic to someone doing this for the money, allow me to point out that the culprits could have chosen much better targets. This country is still number-one in the world for huge, untapped reserves of Confederate statues.

Campaign Watch

HOUSE Former Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) is now Representative-elect former Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY). He soundly defeated Republican county legislator Mazi Pilip last night, after the polls yet again failed to predict a sound Republican defeat. For weeks, we were told (including by me!) that this was a “close” race, which it was if you consider 53.9% close to 46.1%.

In defense of pollsters — I will deny to the death ever saying that — it is possible that the pollsters were right, but turnout is becoming a whole new dynamic because, as seen in Pilip’s case, the Republican Party is embracing a culture of sheer incompetence in candidates, staff, and brain thinking.

This was the race to succeed ousted Rep. George Santos (R-NY). Meaning Speaker Tom Johnson’s (R-LA) teeny margin of House control just got one Suozzus teenier.

PENNSYLVANIA Democrats notched up another win in an allegedly purple suburb last night. Republicans control the Pennsylvania state Senate, and Democrats had a majority of just one seat in the state House, meaning a loss in last night’s Bucks County special election would’ve created an even split there. But Democrats held on.

The winner is a school-board member, showing the surging strength of Democratic voters who support making white kids feel bad about slavery while being groomed to have sex with drag queens and/or Republican clergy who fantasize about drag queens.

TCB

While I’m still figuring out how to use substack, or domstack for that matter, I do see those of you who are restacking your loyal TFN. Thank you! The more folks who share what we’re doing, the more newsuckers there shall be!

You can find me on Twitter and Facebook. And I’m even on Bluesky and Mastodon. Because ya never know.

Go get ‘em, kids…!

1. D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.