'A Stain on This Institution': Eric Schmitt Scorches Chuck Schumer's Sham Impeachment 'Trial' of Mayorkas

If you were paying attention to the Swamp on Wednesday, you may have learned a valuable lesson: namely, that the Senate isn't bound by the Constitution if it doesn't feel like it. At least, that appears to be the position of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his fellow Senate Democrats.

While few thought a conviction likely after the House impeached Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Schumer and the Democrats apparently have now determined that the Senate needn't even hold a trial. They can essentially just nolle pros impeachment articles if they don't suit their political purposes. I suppose that's good for the Republicans to know the next time they're back in the majority.

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Following the sham non-trial trial, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) took to the floor of the Senate to offer remarks regarding the unprecedented nature of the day's proceedings. During his remarks, he yielded the floor to several of his Republican colleagues, who also shared their disdain for the Democrats' willingness to upend 200-plus years of precedent and shred the Constitution. Among those was Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who first raised the objection to Schumer's proposed farcical arrangement of "allowing" the Republicans some time to debate before moving to dismiss the Articles of Impeachment without a trial.

Schmitt offered a scorching rebuke of Schumer's feeble attempt to offer "structure to the arson you're committing":

[I want the] press folks who were here who've left to really understand what happened today. Because what happened today wasn't some disagreement about the number of amendments we might have on an appropriation bill or whether or not some vehicle is going to be a priority or not. What was established today was a new precedent — something that had never taken place in this chamber in the history of our Republic.
What the Senate Democrats decided to do with a simple majority was to bulldoze 200 years of precedent that said something very simple: that this chamber would honor our constitutional obligation and conduct a trial; to hear the evidence — there's no real debate — we were to hear the evidence from witnesses, counsel is present. There's a whole process; there's a whole procedure that's been established — finely wrought, throughout the ages — that we were to honor when we raise our right hand, when we get sworn in, to honor — when we got sworn in today — to honor as United States senators.
That's all gone now — maybe forever. I don't see a circumstance now — you heard the parliamentary inquiries asking if a precedent had ever been established for this or that. A hundred years from now, when somebody else has Harry Truman's desk, if I remember to carve my name in it before I die, will have this desk. I don't know that person's name. I don't know their background or what their life experience will be. But what — they'll know what happened today. They'll know...that the United States Senate under Chuck Schumer, who will go down as one of the worst US senators in American history because of his actions today, will know that we just blew off an important duty to conduct a trial.
It wasn't, you know, an idea — and to paraphrase is my friend from Louisiana — it wasn't some, you know, gamer bro with a tweet. These were Articles of Impeachment, voted on by The People's representatives — in the House of Representatives — walked over here and delivered. And so Chuck Schumer and the Democrats who voted for that, they're going to have to own that. And to paraphrase something the senator from Kentucky said just a few years ago, I think they're going to regret it, and I think they're going to regret it sooner than they think.
So, having said that, what was this trial supposed to be about? And as...the senator from Utah mentioned, when I was attorney general in Missouri, we brought the first lawsuit against the Biden administration for their actions at the southern border when they decided to undo Remain in Mexico. We were successful for a while, but what came out of that was a lot of what you might have read in...Article I of the impeachment that were brought over. A lot of those were from — a lot of those arguments — were from that case. And as an interesting little side note, when we won, when we had an injunction in place actually for the Biden administration to keep this very important protection in place, they ignored it. We had to go back in front of a judge time and time again to get them to abide by the law. But what we have found out from this administration — and Secretary Mayorkas specifically — is that he is willing, he himself is willing, to subvert the law, to believe that he is above the law, to lie and to commit a felony that this chamber now has said doesn't rise to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor — forever. That is the precedent forever.
So, the human toll of this lawlessness at the border that has been overseen by Secretary Mayorkas is devastating. Thousands of people die every month for fentanyl abuses or overdoses. We have a ticking time bomb in this country with the national security threat. We don't know who two million people are. Nine million people have come here illegally. Most of them...have been told, 'Please show up for a court date sometime in the 2030s.' That's not going to happen. But two million of them, we don't know who they are, we don't know where they're from, we don't know where they're at. We're seeing a record number of Chinese nationals come across just in California alone; people from all across the world coming here because they know our border is wide open.
And it's not by accident. And whatever the motivations are, Secretary Mayorkas's memo and instruction to his employees to ignore the law — the immigration law in this country, the snapshot is if somebody comes here illegally, they're detained, they're deported unless some adjudication exists, like an asylum claim is processed. Nine out of 10 of those are bogus. That had been the law of our country — the law of the land — for a very long time among Republican and Democrat administrations. No longer. Because Secretary Mayorkas has decided to instruct his employees to subvert that law.
If you want to change it, come here. If you want to change a 'shall' to a 'may,' that's what we're supposed to do. That's what the Article One branch is supposed to do — just like the Article One branch here in the Senate is supposed to hold people accountable who are in high positions of government. It is our remedy. And as the back and forth in that United States v. Texas and Missouri case, from Justice Kavanaugh to the solicitor general of the United States indicated, what is the remedy here? And the Department of Justice's own lawyer said, 'Well, they have the remedy of impeachment.' But I guess we don't actually have that anymore.
And so I know this in these...24-hour news cycles things move on quickly — tomorrow we're going to be on, you know, FISA, there's national security stuff. And it'll be easy to sort of, I think for many, to sort of wipe today away. But it won't go away. It's a stain on this institution, it diminishes this body. It is why I stood up to object to a ridiculous idea that somehow we're supposed to negotiate away our constitutional duty. That isn't up for grabs — that's our job. 'Oh, thank you, Senator Schumer, for giving us a half hour to talk about this.' No thanks — not for me.
Now, would I do that on some amendment to an approps. bill? Probably not. But when Senator Schumer wants to set our constitutional order on fire, I will stand up, and I will object, and I know many other people share that point of view. There is no structure to the arson you're committing.
So I appreciate the inquiry or...this back-and-forth we're having with the senator from Utah because, sadly, this is all we're left with. So many powers of individual senators have been given away over the years. This institution is no longer the world's greatest deliberative body. It's Kabuki theater, with fewer powers now individual senators have and fewer powers that we've been given by our Founders as an institution. For what? For what? A couple of bad days, couple of news cycles? Congratulations...Chuck Schumer, you're going to own that, and every single Democrat that voted for it will, too. So, the border crisis isn't going away; it still exists. The Senate lost an opportunity to hear evidence to hold someone accountable today.