Roger Marshall and Eric Schmitt only push sham Mayorkas impeachment to boost Trump | Opinion

The impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is political showbiz, folks. Nothing more. It’s a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing except the fact that Republicans think they can use immigration as a potent campaign issue against President Joe Biden in November.

Which means — of course — that the impeachment of Mayorkas is very, very important to Roger Marshall and Eric Schmitt.

The two men, U.S. senators from Kansas and Missouri, on Tuesday took part in a press conference demanding that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hold a Senate trial for Mayorkas when the U.S. House gets around to sending over the articles of impeachment, expected sometime in the next few days. (On Thursday, the region’s other two senators — Jerry Moran of Kansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri — signed onto a GOP letter repeating the demand.)

Schmitt, bless him, at least tried to make the case that matters of grand principle are involved.

“Two hundred years from now, people will look back — senators who we don’t know their names, sitting in seats in that chamber — will look back to what happens in the next seven days,” he said. “And it will set a course for the rest of American history. Because there’s no going back. Once you break the seal here, there will be no impeachment trials ever again.”

Marshall, meanwhile, barely bothered to disguise his political motives.

Immigration, he said, “is so toxic to Senate Democrats to House Democrats and to Joe Biden that they do not want this to be the issue of the day,” he said. “But my hope is that the good people in Montana and Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania that they hold their senators accountable this November.”

Those are Democratic senators, in case you didn’t get the gist.

Marshall might be right about the political importance of immigration. Voters are pretty concerned about the issue. But the arguments for impeaching Mayorkas — and holding a trial in the Senate — are nonsense.

Why? Because Mayorkas hasn’t committed a “high crime or misdemeanor.” You know, the constitutional standard for impeachment. His only so-called crime is that he is the face of a Biden administration’s immigration policy. And punishing policy differences is not what impeachment is for.

It’s not like Mayorkas incited an insurrection at the Capitol.

Indeed, the case against the Homeland Security chief is so weak that Republicans haven’t been able to get all their colleagues on board. It took GOP leaders two tries in the House to affirm the articles of impeachment — and Rep. Ken Buck, a conservative Republican from Colorado, was so disgusted by the process he promptly resigned from Congress.

“We’ve taken impeachment and we’ve made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept,” Buck said.

“Social media issue” is just the 21st way of saying “showbiz.” No wonder Schumer is reportedly interested in dismissing the charges without holding a trial.

The problem? Fox News reported this week a dozen or so pro-impeachment Republicans are planning to bring business in the Senate to a halt if they don’t get their impeachment trial. The real work of the Senate would be deferred and delayed for the sake of a performative political stunt.

But that work includes making policy, or ought to anyway. If our GOP senators really wanted American immigration policy to change — if they wanted Biden to crack down on migrants coming across the southern border — they could have backed a get-tough immigration bill negotiated last month by their fellow conservative senator, James Lankford of Oklahoma. Biden, you’ll recall, said he would sign that proposal into law.

Instead, all four Republican senators from Kansas and Missouri opposed the bill.

That’s probably because Donald Trump came out against the effort — and did so because he saw that actually solving the immigration problem would deprive him of an issue against Biden in November.

That means the GOP call for a trial is a way of signaling to voters that they’re doing something about immigration without actually doing something about immigration.

That’s showbiz, baby.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.