Impeach Biden over the Security Catastrophe
The president’s dereliction of duty has created a crisis. Congress must either impeach him or fix it. Without Title 42 illegal crossings will grow between two and three times as high as it is now.
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY - December 31, 2022
The president’s dereliction of duty has created a crisis. Congress must either impeach him or fix it.
President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House Republican majority over his ongoing destruction of the southern border.
Yes, I know, the votes for a conviction are not there at the moment, and probably won’t ever be: The Constitution requires a two-thirds Senate supermajority to convict and remove an elected official from office, and Biden’s Democratic Party will hold a two-seat majority in the upper chamber for the next two years.
Yet there must be an impeachment investigation and, if Biden fails to change course, articles of impeachment. That would forever stain him, which he deserves; more significantly, it would force the Senate to shut down other business and conduct a trial that would expose the depth of our security catastrophe and the fact that Democrats have willfully caused it.
If Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell don’t fancy that prospect, here’s a suggestion: Fix the friggin’ border. Oh, and stop ramming through omnibus boondoggles that spend billions on processing and sheltering illegal aliens but explicitly forbid shifting American taxpayer funds to protect Americans by securing the border.
The president’s dereliction of duty has abetted a foreign invasion of, so far, approximately 6 million illegal aliens. A large number of these aliens are released into our country in violation of American law. And mind you, we haven’t even faced the onslaught that awaits the rescission of Title 42, the Covid-era restriction on immigration that the courts have blocked Biden from lifting since May. As I detailed in a column earlier this week, although the Supreme Court has temporarily kept Title 42 in place, its rescission is inevitable because it is a pretext, not a policy. Once it is lifted, the current rate of illegal immigration — an eye-popping 6,785 apprehensions per day, with another 2,000-odd “got-aways” who evade capture as they enter — will grow to somewhere between two and three times as high as it is now.
To provide some perspective, during the Obama–Biden years, the Department of Homeland Security regarded it as a crisis if the number of illegal-alien encounters inched up to 1,000 per day, which computes to 365,000 per year. “A thousand [per day] overwhelms the system,” Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, acknowledged in a 2019 interview. At the time, the Trump administration was dealing with four times that amount due to a surge in border arrivals by alien family units and unaccompanied alien minors. (The surge was caused by the refusal of congressional Democrats to cooperate in Trump’s signature border-security priority; it was quelled, as Rich Lowry related, because Trump induced cooperation from other countries.)
Thanks to Biden’s wholesale adoption of transnational-progressive radicalism, we are now at seven times the number that Johnson conceded would constitute a crisis. Post–Title 42, we could find ourselves at 18 times that amount, or perhaps even more — and remember, that’s just the apprehensions, not the got-aways.
By what multiple must a president intentionally metastasize a crisis, for the benefit of foreigners and to the ruin of the American people, before he is impeached?
Bear in mind that, to the limited extent illegal aliens are being barred from release into the United States upon being apprehended, Title 42 is the main reason. Most of the rest are released, in violation of American law. For example, in June, of the approximately 240,000 aliens apprehended, about 100,000 were barred under Title 42. That number should be higher, but Biden has watered down Trump’s Title 42 enforcement, admitting unaccompanied minors (including young men who convince border agents that they are under 18), along with most aliens who convince border agents that they are traveling as family units. Of the remaining 140,000 June apprehensions, over 95,000 (i.e., two-thirds) were released into our country. (Most of the rest were subject to expedited removal because of fraud or criminal records that make them instantly excludable.)
As I noted in the aforementioned column, if you counted only the apprehensions that will result when Biden rescinds Title 42 without putting any meaningful security plan in its place — i.e., if you omit hundreds of thousands of additional got-aways — you’d get a figure of around 6,570,000 illegal aliens arriving at our border per year, a population roughly the size of our 17th-largest state, Indiana, and a third again as big as our second-largest city, Los Angeles. But this just scratches the surface, for we must also factor in the approximately 6 million aliens, including got-aways, who’ve already illegally entered the country in the first two years of Biden’s presidency (the number had aggregated to nearly 5 million by July 2022, and entries have soared to new record levels in the five ensuing months). If Biden had gotten his way and lifted Title 42 already, the accumulated total could have exceeded 12.5 million by the end of 2023. That’s around the size of Illinois, the nation’s sixth-largest state by population, and larger than two-thirds of countries in the world. And again, Title 42 is going to be lifted — and the Supreme Court has no control over whether it is further gutted in the meantime.
We’re talking here not merely about a border-security crisis. We’re leaps and bounds past that. This is an invasion — millions of aliens rushing our border in a manner that is illegal, and thus hostile. (How remarkable that Democrats, who never hesitate to describe a five-hour riot that posed no serious threat to the republic as an insurrection, scream bloody murder when someone uses the word invasion to describe millions of foreigners lawlessly storming our border, with tens to hundreds of thousands more currently staging to storm the gates the moment Title 42 is lifted.) Biden’s refusal to secure the border is potentially an existential crisis for the United States. It already is an existential crisis for border states, which are expected by their federal overlords not just to accept the onslaught but to bear the ruinous costs of public education and health care, in addition to exorbitant supplemental law-enforcement expenditures at a time when crime is already surging nationwide.
In Faithless Execution, my 2014 book on impeachment, I argued that it would be counterproductive for the House to impeach a president without having built a political case first — i.e., without having persuaded the country, across partisan and ideological lines, that the president’s misconduct was so egregious and threatening that removal was warranted. The Framers believed impeachment was an indispensable arrow in Congress’s quiver to ensure that the awesome powers of the presidency were not turned against the nation, particularly on behalf of foreign interests. But a premature or purely partisan impeachment can perversely embolden a president, who is apt to use Senate acquittal as vindication of his misconduct and thus to engage in more of the same and worse. The Democrats’ 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump bears this out: They carried out a strictly partisan process — exactly what the Framers sought to prevent — over behavior that, while censurable, was not significant enough to warrant impeachment; it begat a Trump who became even more audacious in 2020, culminating in the shocking Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.
But we’re in a different posture now. To begin with, even if Biden were emboldened by acquittal, the damage to the country could not get much worse: Without a border, we won’t have a country. If there were an armed invasion of just a few thousand foreigners — a bare fraction of the foreigners now pouring in, who, while mostly unarmed, are transporting not-insignificant amounts of deadly illegal narcotics — a president who refused to act would be impeached and removed forthwith. Biden is not merely refusing to act; he is intentionally doubling down on policies that exacerbate the crisis. To compare, the January 6 Committee convincingly contends that Trump is unfit for the presidency because he not only failed to respond decisively to the Capitol riot but took actions that exacerbated it.
Moreover, with Republicans poised to assume control of the House next week, there is already support growing in the caucus to move on impeaching Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. True, an impeachment investigation of the president’s executive-branch subordinates can be useful in raising public awareness of egregious administration misconduct. On that score, there is a good case for impeaching both Mayorkas and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is putatively running point on the administration’s border nonenforcement policy. Impeaching subordinates, however, won’t halt egregious administration misconduct. Mayorkas is not running his own show; he is carrying out Biden’s policy. One of the Framers’ principal objectives in crafting a unitary presidency — i.e., in vesting all executive power in a single official, the president — was to promote accountability, to prevent the elected chief executive from shifting blame for his administration’s misconduct to a privy council or unelected subordinates. What’s going on at the southern border is Biden’s catastrophe; Mayorkas and Harris are simply following orders.
By destroying the border, President Biden is destroying the country. That’s a bracing assertion, but I am not engaging in the habitual hyperbole with which our competing political parties customarily frame each other as monstrous. This is common sense. Defended borders are an ineliminable element of national sovereignty. A nation is a nation only if it has internationally recognized territory over which it exercises dominion and control. A rudimentary component of dominion and control is the power to exclude intruders — those who lack lawful authority to enter and to be present. One of Biden’s jobs, which he swore an oath to perform faithfully and in a manner consistent with the Constitution, is to defend the border. And he is violating that oath, exploiting the power of the presidency on behalf of non-Americans to strip the United States of its sovereignty. A clearer case for impeachment there has never been.
And the imperative of impeaching Biden is even more urgent than that. He did not start out this way. He has never been an original thinker, much less a visionary leader. He is a Democratic Party weather vane. If progressives changed their minds tomorrow and decided that illegal immigrants were likely to support Republicans, Biden, on a dime, would become the scourge of illegal immigration. He is not erasing the border because he believes in a progressive, post-Westphalian, internationalist order in which multilateral sovereigns roll out the eco-friendly carpet for citizens of the world. He is erasing the border because that is what he has to do to remain viable in a Democratic Party that is dominated by radical leftists who would tell you the very mention of the word “American” triggers them . . . except they don’t say “trigger” anymore, either.
Washington Democrats get away with this because they play a clever game. It’s the same sort of game they play with abortion: They tell the public they are for “choice” and a procedure that is “safe, legal, and rare,” but when pressed on the matter, they can’t actually describe any circumstances in which they’d outlaw the procedure. Here’s the border version of the game: They lament that “the system is broken” and insist that they favor “an orderly enforcement process.” But it turns out that the “system is broken” because they themselves oppose the enforcement of immigration laws that call for illegal immigrants (who are now “migrants”) to be detained and promptly deported. And the “orderly enforcement process” they favor is one in which “migrants” are logged and released at their point of entry, with a court date in the distant future or instructions to report to some immigration agency once they are quietly settled in the country. (While Democrats complain that the Republican governors of Texas and Florida are transporting illegal aliens to blue sanctuary cities or to Vice President Harris’s doorstep, the Biden–Harris administration — like the Obama–Biden administration before it — routinely consigns illegal aliens to communities throughout the country, often without alerting the locals in advance.)
Broadly speaking, the country does not know how bad the situation at the border is. As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur points out, in recent polling by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, just 13 percent knew that there were over 2 million illegal border crossings per year. Not only did the remaining 87 percent significantly underestimate the number of illegal entries, but more than half of them believed the number to be less than half a million.
By and large, Americans do not know the border is being erased. This is the paramount flaw in the federalization of immigration enforcement wrought by the courts over the past century: The duty to enforce the laws has been transferred from the people most affected by the lawlessness to Washington — i.e., to the people who don’t care about the lawlessness, who are thus abetting the lawlessness, who are quite content to keep the resulting chaos out of the news, and who are politically accountable to others for whom the border is a remote nonconcern. No surprise, then, that Americans are uninformed about the invasion and the havoc it is wreaking on the states bearing the brunt of the lawlessness. Nor is it widely understood that the crisis is occurring because Democrats do not believe the country should have an enforced border.
The objectives of impeaching Biden and perhaps other administration officials would be to illuminate the profound threat to our country, to place the blame for it squarely where it belongs, and to force Democrats either to reverse course or to publicly own their radical position that the United States should not have enforceable borders and that the government should prioritize the desires of aliens over the security of Americans. The Framers believed impeachment was indispensable not because they thought we’d make a habit of removing presidents but because the credible threat of impeachment and removal — the historical stigma and the prospect of losing power — would encourage presidents to honor the constitutional oath and execute the laws faithfully.
The crisis at the border is the direct result of President Biden’s impeachable dereliction of duty. That dereliction is a direct result of the Democrats’ core positions that our country should not have a border, and that illegal aliens are entitled to enter, remain at liberty, and exploit public services at the expense of American taxpayers. These matters need to be exposed and confronted. The way to expose and confront them is to impeach Biden. Otherwise, he will stay the course, Democrats will continue undermining border security, and the crisis will become existential.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy