‘This Week on the Hill’: Scalise Talks Impeachment, Border Security, Voting

On Saturday’s episode of “This Week on the Hill,” Family Research Council’s president Tony Perkins spoke to U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) about U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) “historic” decision to throw out articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. As Perkins noted, Mayorkas is one of only two U.S. cabinet secretaries to have been impeached and the first to have been impeached in nearly 150 years. Previously, President Ulysses S. Grant’s War Secretary William Belknap was impeached by the House in 1876, but acquitted by the Senate.

Last week, Schumer and the Democratic majority in the Senate quashed both articles of impeachment filed by the House of Representatives charging Mayorkas with breach of public trust and “willful and systemic refusal to comply with” immigration law. Senate Democrats simply dismissed the articles as unconstitutional. “They didn’t even hold a hearing, didn’t even allow for the evidence to be presented,” Perkins exclaimed Saturday. “What does it say?”

“What it says is that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden don’t care about securing America’s border,” Scalise explained. “It has become the number one issue in America. Americans are livid that this border is wide open. Joe Biden opened it, starting on his very first day in office, when he began unraveling a lot of the things that President Trump did.”

Scalise noted that former President Donald Trump had taken action on border security during his time in office, beginning construction of a border wall and negotiating the “Remain in Mexico” policy, requiring migrant asylum-seekers at America’s southern border to await their U.S. court appointment in Mexico. Aided by Mayorkas, Biden halted border wall construction, did away with the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and implemented a new “Catch and Release” policy, instructing border security agents to release immigrants caught entering the U.S. illegally. “And we don’t even know where they’re going,” Scalise lamented. “We don’t know what states they’re being released into. You see some of these sanctuary cities — New York, L.A., San Francisco — giving them checks, $10,000 debit cards to come to their cities, and it’s wreaking havoc all over America.”

The veteran congressman explained that the House Homeland Security Committee spent months building a case against Mayorkas, charging that “he’s derelict in his duties, in his main mission of keeping America safe, protecting America’s homeland.” Scalise quipped, “He is the Homeland Security secretary, after all.” Mayorkas himself was called before the committee to testify on numerous occasions. Scalise recounted, “And on many hearings, you saw him come to Capitol Hill and say that the border is secure. That’s one of the biggest lies in Washington. Everybody in America knows that.”

Once the House formally filed articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, in a narrow 214 to 213 vote, they were sent to the Senate. “At a minimum, you should have seen a trial where they weighed the evidence,” Scalise said. “You know, he [Mayorkas] should have been able to present his case. If he’s really innocent, then he would have presented his case and proven his innocence. But he couldn’t do that. So Schumer used some of his henchmen to literally just discard this.”

“While the Senate might think that they can ignore this through Chuck Schumer and his far-left allies, America is not ignoring this,” Scalise declared. “America is paying attention. And that’s the biggest threat to Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and the radicals on the far-Left who are controlling the Democrat Party. People are disgusted by the open border.” He added that the White House and the Senate cannot simply “ignore” the illegal immigration crisis. “It’s not going away. It’s only going to get worse.”

Noting the increased threat to American security the open border poses — not to mention the flagrant dereliction of immigration law — Scalise said, “The American people don’t want it to happen. And the president is ignoring those pleas.” Addressing Republican-led increased House oversight, the Majority Leader stated, “We’re just going to be more aggressive. And frankly, the American people want us to be more aggressive and have some real oversight over the failures of the Biden administration.”

Scalise also stressed the importance of voting against the Biden regime in November, arguing that a Republican-controlled White House, Senate, and House could work together to undo the damage wrought over the past four years by the Biden administration. “Clearly there are some things, I think that would excite everybody in America: you would be able to lock in tax policy that allows our economy to grow again, secure America’s border, get back to energy security where we can provide our own energy,” Scalise explained. “This is where people all across the country, voters will have a say and have to speak out. Do you like these policies or not?”