Scott trolls Harris over Mayorkas trial in Senate
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) called out Vice President Harris on Tuesday, encouraging her to preside over the Senate impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Scott wrote a letter to Harris after the House impeached Mayorkas last week, arguing her role as the head of the Senate and the fact she was tasked with addressing the root causes of migration by President Biden in 2021 makes her the best person to preside over the trial.
“When President Biden appointed you as the ‘border czar’ in early 2021, he tasked you with ‘stemming the migration to our southern border.’ In accepting that appointment, you acknowledged a need ‘to deal with the root causes’ of the flows of illegal immigration across our southern border,” Scott wrote to Harris.
“As such, you should be keenly interested in learning whether a high-ranking member of your administration is one of those ‘root causes’ through his willful and persistent refusal to enforce our country’s immigration laws, frustrating the very core function of your role as President Biden’s ‘border czar,’” he said.
Harris has rejected the title “border czar,” which has been used by Republicans, and recently has accused the House GOP of wanting a political issue to run on this year instead of wanting to fix the situation at the border.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has already said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who is the president pro tempore of the Senate, will preside over the trial.
But Scott told Harris he wanted to “encourage and invite you” to preside.
“Our states and cities face an ongoing and widespread crisis due to the flood of illegal immigrants streaming across our southern and northern borders and moving freely within the interior of the homeland,” Scott said, calling Harris “the appropriate constitutional presiding officer to oversee the impeachment trial.”
The House last week eked out a narrow 214-213 vote to impeach the first Cabinet official since the 1870s. The vote followed a failed first effort in the House to impeach Mayorkas and the articles are not expected to move in the Democrat-led Senate.
The White House has argued the impeachment effort against Mayorkas is unconstitutional and politically motivated. After the vote, Biden slammed Republicans who voted to impeach Mayorkas, arguing that history will not look kindly on them.
The White House has also slammed Republicans for rejecting the legislation a group of senators unveiled last week that included measures to tighten security at the border, as well as aid to Ukraine and Israel. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called it insufficient and dead on arrival in the House and instead focused on impeaching Mayorkas.
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