In a House hearing considering the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) suggested that perhaps the trouble at the border — the raison d’etre for the GOP drive to impeach Mayorkas — wasn’t Mayorkas’s fault after all.
Greene proposed the idea of Mayorkas’s innocence as a springboard to implicate President Joe Biden and justify impeachment proceedings against the President instead of Mayorkas. “Maybe we shouldn’t be having hearings on my articles of impeachment to impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” Greene said, “Maybe we should be holding articles of impeachment on the President of the United States.
Greene tried to switch Mayorkas for Biden by forcing Princeton University Law & Public Policy Director and Professor Deborah Pearlstein, who was testifying, to distinguish between what she characterized as Mayorkas’s dangerously incompetent and criminal ineptitude (the bar for impeachment is high crimes and misdemeanors) and the Secretary’s simply following the Biden administrations “policy.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene relentlessly harasses and demeans a poor witness pic.twitter.com/WxCyVVGY1p
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 18, 2024
Greene’s gambit here is that if Pearlstein chooses “policy” as the culprit, Biden is on the hook. If she doesn’t, then back to Mayorkas.
In the testimony segment above, Pearlstein hardly gets to answer as Greene talks over her and tries to force the Princetonian into making a binary choice — Biden policy or Mayorkas. Pearlstein doesn’t deliver one and doesn’t offer up Greene’s hoped-for “gotcha” moment.
In ripping into an Ivy Leaguer’s testimony, Greene follows the trail blazed by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whose questioning of two Ivy League presidents (plus the president of MIT) became a flashpoint for an anti-elitist campaign against the prestigious universities. Stefanik’s national profile increased dramatically after the hearings, and she has been spoken of as a potential Donald Trump running mate on a Republican ticket.
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