News

(WASHINGTON) — The House on Tuesday will vote on a Republican-led resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the southern border.

The articles of impeachment accuse Mayorkas, long the target of GOP attacks when it comes to immigration policy, of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust” amid a surge in unauthorized migrant crossings.

Mayorkas has vigorously defended himself and the department, calling the allegations “baseless” and insisting it won’t distract from their work. Democrats have contended the impeachment effort is unconstitutional and politically motivated.

Republicans have a razor-thin three-vote majority in the House, and at least one member of the conference has said he is against impeaching Mayorkas: Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado.

Buck, explaining his decision in an op-ed published by The Hill, said he thinks Mayorkas will “most likely be remembered as the worst secretary of Homeland Security in the history of the United States” but didn’t believe his conduct amounted to the Constitution’s impeachment high bar of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

If the House does vote to approve the resolution, it would mark just the second time in U.S. history a Cabinet official has been impeached. The issue would then go to trial in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds majority vote would be needed to convict.

The vote on whether to impeach Mayorkas coincides with a fierce debate over a new bipartisan bill that would amount to the first major overhaul of the immigration system in years.

The measure, the product of months of behind-the-scenes negotiations among a bipartisan group of senators, is supported by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden.

Mayorkas, who played a role in negotiations, praised the bill as “tough, fair, and takes meaningful steps to address the challenges our country faces after decades of Congressional inaction.”

But House Republican leaders, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, have already deemed it dead on arrival if it gets past the Senate. Former President Donald Trump, looking to make immigration a top issue in the 2024 campaign, has also come out strong against the bill, calling it “ridiculous” and a “trap” for Republicans.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., criticized Republicans on both impeachment and the border bill as the House Rules Committee met Monday to mark up the Mayorkas resolution.

“Are you seriously going to come here and look us in the eye with a straight face and claim this is all about the border when you refuse to come together with Democrats and work on the border?” McGovern said. “No, you’d all rather advance this baseless, extreme, unconstitutional impeachment stunt. It’s really something else.”

House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole, R-Oka., countered that Mayorkas is a “chief architect” of the border crisis and said the vote is about “accountability.”

“Secretary Mayorkas has refused to uphold his oath of office. If he will not do so, his duty, then unfortunately the House must do its constitutional duty,” Cole said during the markup.

The White House on Monday called the impeachment effort “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”

“Impeaching Secretary Mayorkas would trivialize this solemn constitutional power and invite more partisan abuse of this authority in the future,” according to a Statement of Administration Policy. “It would do nothing to solve the challenges we face in securing our Nation’s borders, nor would it provide the funding the President has repeatedly requested for more Border Patrol agents, immigration judges, and cutting-edge tools to detect and stop fentanyl at the border.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — When all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court signed a new ethics code last year, each pledged to step aside from a case when “impartiality might be reasonably questioned” or when a justice or a spouse has a financial interest in the dispute.

That pledge, made amid ethics questions involving Justice Clarence Thomas and some of his colleagues — and which is not independently enforced — is now being put to the test in one of the court’s most high-profile and high-stakes cases in a generation, ethics experts say.

Former President Donald Trump this week will ask the justices to overturn a Colorado Supreme Court decision which said he had “engaged in insurrection” and is ineligible for the 2024 ballot under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Thomas, the court’s most senior conservative, has unique association to events at the center of the ruling.

His wife Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, is a longtime conservative activist and Trump booster who helped lead the “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn results of the 2020 election and who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House but did not march on the Capitol.

“Ginni Thomas was a supporter of Donald Trump’s, from pretty early on in his campaign, and she has maintained that support even through today,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a judicial watchdog group. “And those attempts to overturn the election was what led to the insurrection, which is what led to Trump being kicked off the ballot in Colorado.”

The Colorado ruling cited Trump’s “direct and express efforts, over several months, exhorting his supporters to march to the Capitol to prevent what he falsely characterized as an alleged fraud on the people of this country.”

Leading legal ethics experts say the activities of Ginni Thomas pose a clear conflict of interest for her husband.

“This is the easiest recusal analysis case you could ever imagine,” said James Sample, a professor and judicial ethics expert at Hofstra University Law School.

“The question isn’t, should Ginni Thomas be allowed or not allowed to engage in political advocacy,” Sample said. “The question here is, should Clarence Thomas, when Ginni Thomas engages in that political advocacy, be allowed to rule on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of that advocacy.”

Top Democrats have implored Justice Thomas to step aside.

“I’m afraid Justice Thomas, through his family, has crossed that line and he should recuse himself so there’s no question or bias in his decision,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told ABC News.

Eight Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote directly to Justice Thomas last month urging him to sit out the case.

“It is unthinkable that you could be impartial,” they wrote. “Ms. Thomas, has shown a fervent bias in favor of Mr. Trump, and it is hard to believe that her bias has no impact on you.”

Justice Thomas has not responded to Democrats’ demands and has not said whether he’ll recuse from the case, but his defenders say the calls are nothing more than a political ploy.

“I think there are people who would like to see Justice Thomas not deciding this case, and therefore they’re going to attack him,” said Carrie Severino, a former Thomas clerk and president of Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group.

“You can spin out a crazy story but why anyone might have some, you know, appearance of impropriety in the eyes of someone who is engaging in conspiracy theories,” Severino said, “but this has to do with what is a reasonable appearance of impropriety.”

Neither the justices nor their spouses are formally bound by the Supreme Court’s ethics code, and each justice gets to make recusal decisions on his or her own.

The Thomases did not respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.

Several of Justice Thomas’ allies suggested to ABC News that he is not likely to recuse from the Trump case. He has already participated in cases that directly or indirectly involved the 2020 election. In all but one case, he did not recuse.

“Her activity is her activity,” said Severino. “Completely apart from the fact that she isn’t, was not involved in anything illegal on that day at all, there’s the fact that she is her own person.”

Ginni Thomas has said she had no role in planning the Jan. 6 event and that she was “disappointed and frustrated that there was violence.”

In testimony before a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 capitol attack, Thomas insisted she does not discuss politics or cases with her husband as an “ironclad rule.”

“Whether or not Clarence and Ginni Thomas discussed these issues in the privacy of their own personal conversations is not the issue,” Sample said. “It’s in the public domain that this case can implicate Ginni Thomas in ways that are particularly important to her and thus derivatively important to Justice Thomas.”

Ginni Thomas’ battle for conservative principles as a political consultant has stretched more than 30 years and distinguishes her from other Supreme Court spouses.

“I don’t think there’s any peer, frankly, in terms of the political activism of Ginni Thomas, she stands alone,” said Roth.

After the 2020 election, Thomas immediately engaged top Republican officials to fight the results, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.

To then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows she texted: “Help this great president stand firm, Mark!! You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice.”

Around the same time, dozens of emails obtained by congressional investigators show Ginni Thomas wrote to Republican legislators in Wisconsin and Arizona urging them to overturn the will of state voters.

Roth said Justice Thomas, at the very least, should offer an explanation of his decision not to recuse.

“It’s not sour grapes, it’s not enmity, it’s not racism. It’s the fact that your wife wanted to overturn the election, and we have a lot of cases dealing with that insurrection. Tell us why you’re not conflicted,” he said.

Ginni Thomas has not been charged with any crimes. Her attorney has said she fully cooperated with congressional investigators, and she is not named in their 845-page report on the Capitol attack.

Still, a majority of Americans — 52% in a Quinnipiac University poll — believe Justice Thomas should sit out cases involving the 2020 election. Nearly as many, 47%, believe his wife’s political activities pose a unique ethical problem.

The Republican front-runner’s Supreme Court appeal this week is likely not the only one the justices could soon hear with ties to fallout from the 2020 election.

Trump is also fighting for absolute presidential immunity in the Special Counsel case against him over alleged election interference.

“This Clarence Thomas scenario related to January 6th and all of the January 6th litigation coming so soon on the heels of the court ostensibly adopting a code of conduct, will, if nothing else, highlight the need for enforcement mechanisms to make the code meaningful,” Sample said.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign has applied for Secret Service protection, according to a spokesperson with the campaign and another source familiar with the situation.

The campaign spokesperson did not say what prompted the request, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

But Haley, who is former President Donald Trump’s remaining major challenger in the 2024 Republican primary race, has faced some recent incidents including being the target of two “swatting” attempts at her home in South Carolina, according to records previously obtained by ABC News.

In both cases, police were falsely directed to her residence on suspicion of a crime. In one of the incidents, she has said, her parents were home with a caretaker when officers arrived with “guns drawn.”

“It put the law enforcement officers in danger, it put my family in danger and, you know, it was not a safe situation,” Haley said in an interview with NBC News last month.

“That’s what happens when you run for president,” she said then. “What I don’t want is for my kids to live like this.”

She added that she felt the “swatting” was evidence of the “chaos surrounding our country right now.” (Both cases have been administratively closed, without known arrests.)

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and a five-person advisory council that includes the leaders of both chambers of Congress will now begin a threat assessment as part of responding to Haley, according to the Secret Service website.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service did not comment.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The three senators who negotiated a bipartisan bill that would beef up border security and immigration enforcement while authorizing more assistance to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine on Monday defended the package after House Republicans — led by Speaker Mike Johnson — are pushing to squash the deal before it even gets to the lower chamber.

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., worked for months to negotiate the terms of the $118.28 billion bipartisan national security supplemental package, the text of which was released Sunday night.

Hours after the text’s release, Johnson shot it down, saying in a statement that the bill is “dead on arrival” and “even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President created.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the legislation will not even receive a vote in the House.

On Monday, Johnson told reporters that the Senate’s bill does not meet “the criteria that’s necessary to solve the problem.”

The negotiators said they are hopeful that the package will pass the Senate and, if it passes, acknowledged that it faces a bumpy road in the House.

“I am hopeful that we’ll pass this bill through the Senate,” Murphy, the top Democratic negotiator, said to ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott. “I think Speaker Johnson is desperate to stop this bill from coming to the House of Representatives because he doesn’t want to deal with it and he knows there will be a lot of pressure for it to pass if it reaches … the House.”

“Our job is first to pass it through the Senate and that is what we are going to try to do this week,” Murphy added.

Former President Donald Trump, who wants to run on immigration in November has put immense pressure on Republicans to reject the deal — putting Republican negotiators in an impossible scenario. Trump called the border deal a “death wish for the Republican Party” and “a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border,” in separate posts on his social media channel Monday.

In an appearance on the Dan Bongino Show on Monday, Trump criticized the border deal, latching on to rhetoric surrounding the deal that it would allow 5,000 migrants into the country a day. Lankford has dismissed this narrative as false.

“This bill is a disaster. This bill has 5,000 people a day potentially coming into our country. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know this. I thought it was a typo. I thought they made a typo,” Trump said.

“This is crazy. This is lunacy, this bill. And you know what it is? It’s a gift to the Democrats,” the former president added.

Murphy did not shy away from claiming his GOP colleagues were bending the knee to Trump’s influence on this issue.

“I watched all of my Republican colleagues in the Senate stand up last fall and say we are not going to support Ukraine aid unless you get a bipartisan deal on the border,” Murphy said. “We got that bipartisan deal. It gives the president real powers to control the border and many Senate Republicans are going to oppose this bill because it is too effective, because Donald Trump is telling them, ‘No keep chaos at the border, don’t solve the problem because that is good politics for us.’ Well that is really bad for the country.”

The Senate will begin moving forward with the legislation later this week beginning with a procedural vote on Wednesday. Sixty senators will need to support the package for it to pass.

Murphy told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday morning that there are “about 25” Senate Republicans who are carefully considering whether or not to support the legislation. At least nine of them will need to support the bill for it to move forward in the Senate later this week, although likely more Republicans will need to back the bill as it’s expected that multiple Democrats will defect.

Lankford has found himself in the middle of a political storm as he fends off criticisms from his own Republican colleagues — including the former president — on the border deal that he helped craft.

“I think everybody is going to make their own decision on that what direction they’re going to go,” Lankford told Scott. “The president has something he is trying to accomplish: he is trying to get elected back to be the president of the United States. I’ve got something I’m trying to accomplish: it’s securing the nation and our borders right now. So he’s got his purposes right now, I’ve got mine.”

A plan for the border is a nonpartisan issue for most Americans, who “just want a secure border,” Lankford said.

He called on his colleagues to read the bill thoroughly and work to come to an agreement.

“We’re going to find out actually in the days ahead as members look at it read it review it as we determine if we’re going to amend it or walk away from it. Everybody has got to be able to make their decisions on that, but it’s open now to conversation and the American people and members of Congress can look at it and say ‘let’s do something or let’s do nothing’ — and we’ve got to figure that out right now.”

On the CBS News program “Face the Nation” Sunday, Sinema said she thinks Johnson can be “persuaded” to support the bill after he has had ample opportunity to understand the bill, ask question and watch the debate in the Senate.

Sinema said change is needed to address a “national security threat” at the southern border.

“While the current administration does bear responsibility for mishandling the border, we have to give new legal tools to the administration and hold them accountable to implement them in order to stop this crisis,” she said.

Ahead of the bill’s text release, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday expressed his support for the border package — and said he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are in lock step.

“Leader McConnell and I, who disagree on many issues, have never worked so closely together on legislation as we did on this, because we both realize the gravity of the situation and how important passage of this legislation is,” Schumer said to reporters.

He said it’s the time for lawmakers to come together to support this important plan for border security.

“We cannot let politics get in the way of passing this legislation,” Schumer said. “The senators have to drown out the noise of politics and politicians who tell them not to vote for this bill for political purposes.”

ABC News’ Lalee Ibssa and Soorin Kim contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev.) —  With two days to go until Nevada’s presidential primary, President Joe Biden appears to have his sights set on November: At a get-out-the-vote rally on Sunday night in North Las Vegas, Biden sharpened his attacks on former President Donald Trump, the only Republican he called out by name in roughly half-hour remarks.

“Trump and his MAGA friends are dividing us, not uniting us. Dragging us back to the past, not leading us in the future. Refusing to accept the results of a general election and seeking, as Trump says, to terminate — his words — ‘terminate’ elements to the U.S. Constitution. You tell me that democracy is not at risk?” Biden said to a “raucous” crowd, according to pool reports.

Biden has focused on criticizing Trump over democracy and rights like abortion access while seeking to paint his likely November rival as too extreme to retake the White House.

At the same time, Trump and other Republicans have hammered Biden over inflation, immigration and foreign policy and the president continues to grapple with months of poor polling and low approval ratings, including a new survey from NBC News — weaknesses seized on by his long shot primary challenger Dean Phillips.

On Sunday night, Biden repeated his anti-MAGA message.

“We have to make sure that we stand for the truth and defeat the lies. You must make it clear that in America, just like all of you do in Nevada, we still believe in honesty, decency, dignity and respect,” he said to cheers.

One woman then shouted from the crowd, “You gotta win, Joe!” prompting Biden to respond, “That’s the reason why I’m running … We have to … It’s not much of a choice.”

The president touted some of his usual campaign stump lines, including what he called his achievements in health care access, infrastructure funding and representation in office while seeking to draw a contrast with Trump’s term in office.

“To call my son, and your sons and daughters, who gave their lives to this country, ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’ that’s how this guy thinks,” Biden said, recalling reporting that Trump had refused to visit the graves of American service members in France during a rainstorm. “Who the hell does he think he is?”

Trump has adamantly denied that reporting, from 2020, and praised service members as “absolute heroes.”

“It’s a fake story and it’s a disgrace that they’re allowed to do it,” he said at the time.

Sunday marked Biden’s fifth visit to Nevada as president — a state where he narrowly beat Trump in 2020.

He entered the second of two events to chants of “four more years!” and said, “Hello Nevada!”

He did not face any protesters, who have interrupted some of his other appearances over his support for Israel in its war against Hamas. He’s also said Israel should be “careful” and seek to protect civilians.

Biden tailored his message in Nevada to include $3 billion in federal funding, from the 2021 infrastructure bill, for Brightline West, a high-speed rail to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which he said will bring 35,000 jobs.

Earlier Sunday, at a high-dollar fundraiser in Henderson, inside the home of prominent Nevada Democrats, Biden jabbed at Trump over his economic record, according to pool reports.

“It sounds unbelievable, un-American, that a sitting — that a former president seeking the office is hoping for a recession,” Biden said.

He sought to project confidence about his prospects on Election Day: “You’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president. And you’re the reason [we’ll] make Donald Trump a loser again,” he said.

Criticizing Trump’s character, he cited Trump’s comments about how people in Perry, Iowa, needed to “get over” a recent school shooting there, saying that’s not how a president is supposed to talk.

Trump, reacting to Perry, had expressed his sympathy as well. “We’re really with you as much as anybody can be,” he said in January. “It’s a very terrible thing that happened. It’s just terrible.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.