The Senate voted on Wednesday to dismiss both articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Democrats voted to rule the articles unconstitutional, saying they did not amount to "high crimes and misdemeanors" and proceeded to adjourn the trial. Mayorkas was not present in the chamber.
Some Senate Republicans had said that Mayorkas did not commit impeachable offenses but sought a trial be conducted, rather than having the articles dismissed. All motions to do so failed.
The initiative was always set to fail at this stage, as Republicans would have needed the support of two thirds of the chamber to remove Mayorkas. The focus was put on whether there would be a trial at all.
After the trial, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the decision to move quickly: "We've set a very unfortunate precedent here which means that the Senate can ignore, in effect, the House's impeachment," McConnell said. "It doesn't make any difference whether our friends on the other side thought he should have been impeached or not: He was."
"And by doing what we just did, we have in effect, ignored the directions of the House which were to have a trial," he continued. "We had no evidence, no procedure. This is a day — it's not a proud day in the history of the Senate."
Democratic Senator John Fetterman, in contrast, reacted by saying that "we were all just pissing away all our time here. ... This was just like a bad show I was forced to watch."
The DHS also praised the decision, saying Democrats were right to dismiss the articles. The vote ""proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment," DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement.
Mayorkas had been formally accused of mishandling efforts to enforce immigration laws, especially when it came to the implementation of a series of family reunification parole programs, which allowed some foreign nationals to wait in the U.S. for immigration visas.
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