By Joshua Arnold

In another norm-shattering Washington first, Senate Democrats on Wednesday killed both impeachment articles against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas without any show of procedure or trial — simply by declaring the articles unconstitutional. If this behavior rings a bell, that’s because it’s the same, cynical play run by Soros-funded prosecutors, escalated from local lawlessness to a federal constitutional crisis.

Ironically, “Senate Democrats tried to claim the constitutional high ground by dismissing the allegations as non-impeachable offenses,” recorded legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy. “Of course, constitutionally speaking, that is not the Senate’s call. The Constitution vests the House with plenary authority over what an impeachable offense is. The Senate’s job is to try the case and acquit if it thinks the evidence is too weak.”

According to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. House of Representatives has “the sole Power of Impeachment,” while the U.S. Senate has “the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” “Essentially, the Senate is sitting as a jury,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “based upon the charges that come over from the House.”

The conflict in the Senate turned into “a procedural battle,” explained Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch,” who had brought the impeachment articles over from the U.S. House and observed the proceedings. He described how Republican senators marshalled an array of parliamentary tactics against “the Democrats efforts to just kill the entire impeachment proceeding and to not allow any debate, nor any presentation of evidence.”

As the minority, Republicans could not force the Democratic majority to take up the impeachment articles; all they could do was delay. Still, these tactics did needle the Senate Democrats. “If it was up to the Democrats and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-N.Y.], they would have just swept it after one motion from the Leader,” remarked Higgins. “Political power trumps law and order: that’s the message that was sent today,” responded Perkins.

“Mayorkas has been impeached. We’ve impeached him through the House,” insisted Higgins. “We formally presented those articles of impeachment to the Senate, whereupon normally a trial would take place.”

The Senate does have a greater degree of latitude regarding the process for trying these articles of impeachment than it would if President Biden were impeached. The Constitution stipulates that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court must preside over presidential impeachments. However, “because Mayorkas is a secretary, not a president,” said Higgins, the Senate can set its own rules on how to proceed. Among other things, this means that “they’re not required to hold a trial on the Senate floor. They could have moved it to committee. So there were Senate mechanisms that the Democrats could have accessed to allow at least the presentation of argument and debate and evidence.”

Not that the process would have mattered very much. “We knew what the outcome was going to be,” Perkins said. Senate Democrats “would not find him guilty. But we assumed that they would follow precedent and allow the evidence to be presented.” In other words, as McCarthy put it, the Democrats’ response to these articles of impeachment is “politics, not law.” Even so, he found it remarkable that, after House Democrats impeached President Trump in 2019 “over abuse of power, without a penal crime,” they would then “straight-facedly claim that Republicans failed to state an impeachable offense.”

In lieu of a just verdict, Higgins would have settled for political accountability for the official who has overseen Biden’s open border policies. “The American people at least deserve to hear the evidence,” he argued, but “all of that presentation of evidence and debate was shut down.” It’s that evidence that Senate Democrats have fought hard to suppress.

“This fuels lawlessness,” Perkins exclaimed, “because it’s totally dismissive of the allegations of wrongdoing.” Indeed, the Senate’s refusal to try the House’s impeachment articles mimics the lawlessness already tolerated in some of America’s largest cities. When violent criminals are let out of jail without cash bail in New York, or when shoplifters know they won’t be prosecuted for any theft under $950 in San Francisco, it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than that these governments are “totally dismissive of the allegations of wrongdoing.” Such disregard for lawlessness — such as releasing an illegal alien on the terror watchlist into the country — was also what earned Mayorkas two impeachment articles in the first place. Reinforcement of this dismissive attitude toward lawlessness from the world’s most august, deliberative body will surely only incite more of it.

Unfortunately, amid their hard fighting for short-term political objectives, Senate Democrats once again resorted to smashing up longstanding norms — as they have done with judicial confirmations and the filibuster. “In the history of our country,” said Higgins, “there’s never been an impeachment … where articles have been passed through the House of Representatives and [been] formally presented to the Senate [in which] the Senate dismissed the impeachment articles without [a] hearing or presentation of evidence, unless the impeached individual had already resigned or left office.”

Thus, “this sets [a] precedent for the Senate,” said Perkins, “in that they’re not even holding trials.” Of course, such precedent-shaping events can cut both ways, depending on who is in power. The next time a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives sends articles of impeachment to a Republican-controlled Senate, if they receive the same type of dismissive wave-off, they will have no one but themselves to blame.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.