As House Republicans ramped up their efforts to issue a partisan impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Media Research Center was excited at the prospect and annoyed that the non-right-wing media were pointing out its partisan nature and noting that it was interfering with genuine efforts to address border issues when it was reported on at all:
- Coates on Justification for Mayorkas Impeachment: ‘You Won’t Find It’
- Nets Fret ‘Heated Arguments,’ ‘Rare Step’ to Impeach Mayorkas Has Border Deal ‘In Jeopardy’
- ABC, CBS Bemoan Mayorkas Impeachment, Still Shill For Dying WH-Senate Border Bill
- ‘With No Evidence’; ABC, CBS Melt Down Over GOP Impeaching Mayorkas on Border Crisis
- Mattingly Suggests To Jeffries That Impeaching Mayorkas Is Racist
Tim Graham tried to lamely play whataboutism over the partisan effort in his Jan. 31 podcast:
As the immigration issue begins to panic Democrats and House Republicans push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the newspapers and networks channel Democrat objectives and imply that only one party’s impeachment efforts are a partisan “sham” with “no evidence.” They insist Democrat impeachments are glorious.
[…]The Wednesday newspapers buried the House hearings into Mayorkas. The Wall Street Journal was best by merely having any mention on the front page at all — one paragraph to notify you the story was on page A-4. The New York Times and The Washington Post couldn’t even mention it anywhere on the front page. But the Times found space on the front page to investigate “far right” influencers claiming pop singer Taylor Swift’s affair with pro football player Travis Kelce was a left-wing “psy-op.”
When the initial impeachment vote failed, along with other setbacks, the MRC then complained that those failures were reported on. Curtis Houck complained in a Feb. 7 post:
House Republicans suffered a series of cringe-worthy losses on Tuesday night as they failed to impeach Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and advance a bill to provide funding to support Israel in its war against the animalistic terrorist group Hamas. Naturally, ABC, CBS, and NBC took victory laps Wednesday morning over the “chaotic night” and “stunner”on Capitol Hill with the GOP’s “embarrassing…setbacks.”
We wish we could lead off with a different network, but ABC’s Good Morning America put an aurora of revelry. Co-host Robin Roberts teased the “chaotic night on Capitol Hill ends with a stunning vote” thanks to “Congressman Al Green, coming from surgery, still in hospital scrubs, to cast the key vote while a bill to provide aid to Israel also fails after Republicans backed away from a bipartisan border deal.”
What party was Green, Robin?
Senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott deserved a cushy salary from House Democrats for the amount of water she carried for them: “[T]his is an embarrassing string of setbacks. In the last 24 hours alone, Republicans killed a border deal they helped negotiate, failed to impeach the Homeland Security secretary, and couldn’t even get enough votes to pass additional aid to Israel.”
[…]NBC’s Today also first went to the vote with co-host Hoda Kotb teasing “new chaos in Washington” and co-host Savannah Guthrie chiming in that it was a “stunner”.
Going later to Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles, Guthrie remarked it was quite “a surprise”.
Nobles boasted in part that it’s “safe to say….this did not turn out the way Republicans had planned”[.] […]
CBS Mornings made it three-for-three with the House GOP in the lead-off spot. Co-host Tony Dokoupil pivoted from the Eye Opener round-up to “the political confusion on Capitol Hill” and “[a]fter weeks of threatening to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly ignoring the border crisis, GOP lawmakers did not have the votes to make an impeachment stick.”
Nicholas Fondacaro similarly whined in another post that day:
In less than 24 hours, congressional Republicans suffered a string of embarrassing mishaps: failing to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the implosion of an aid bill to Israel, and failed coordination on border policy. But instead of just reporting on what happened and the state of play on Capitol Hill, CNN’s Dana Bash decided to kick off Wednesday’s Inside Politics with a victory dance in the end zone.
“Today on Inside Politics: epic failure, dysfunction, humiliation, and inability to govern. And that’s the most charitable way to describe the congressional Republicans right now, a stunning series of mind-boggling defeats and self-owns,” she boasted at the top of the show.
Bash was looking forward to the next shoe to drop: “And minutes from now, Senate Republicans will almost certainly torpedo the most conservative border bill before them in decades.”
[…]And the gloating didn’t stop there. “If it were only today’s vote, it would be tough enough, but it’s not. The collapse of this immigration deal is only piling on to a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for congressional Republicans,” she mocked, making a reference to the kid’s book by the same name from author Judith Viorst; complete with an on-screen graphic.
[…]Bash was supposedly one of CNN’s top journalists who had the credibility to host their major political and election events like town halls and debates. But given this behavior, one could easily mistake Bash a political operative celebrating the failures of their opposing side. Oh, that’s right. She was.
Fondacaro would never admit that he’s a political operative whining that the failures of his side are being discussed in the media — and he would never complain that Fox News regularly celebrates the policy failures of Democrats.
Alex Christy grumbled in a Feb. 8 post that the return of a Democratic congressman to sink the impeachment vote was noted by late-night hosts:
After the vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas failed, host of CBS’s The Late Show, Stephen Colbert, and NBC’s Late Night host, Seth Meyers, took the time on Wednesday to celebrate and hail the “heroic return” and “dramatic” return of Democratic Rep. Al Green from the hospital that doomed the vote.
Colbert recalled, “Republicans thought they could lose three of their votes and still win the impeachment vote. But they did not count on the heroic return of Texas Democratic Congressman and businessman werewolf, Al Green.”
Enjoying Republicans struggle, Colbert continued, “The GOP was counting on Green not showing up because he was in the hospital recovering from abdominal surgery. But he learned about the impeachment vote while watching television, so he grabbed an Uber to the Capitol. That takes a lot of guts, some of which might still be in the back of that Uber. Then he arrived on the floor of Congress still in a hospital gown with no shoes. Turns out, he was wearing one boot, but he left it in Mike Johnson’s ass.”
Over on NBC, Meyers reached for the WWE analogy, “Amazing, so basically, one surprise Democrat screwed the Republicans by showing up at the last minute, like Stone Cold Steve Austin interrupting a wrestling match. Although Democratic Congressman Al Green’s entrance was actually more dramatic than Stone Cold’s, as he was in the hospital recovering from emergency abdominal surgery last Friday and Republicans therefore assumed he wouldn’t be present for the vote, but he was.”
Christy concluded by huffing like the paid Republican partisan he is: “Colbert and Meyers should get their laughs in now because Republicans may try again later and the border is still a mess.”
Mark Finkelstein whined that a CNN commentator likened the Mayorkas failure to a “Neville Chamberlain moment” in a Feb. 8 post:
There were still more than 10 months to go, but John Avlon had the early lead in the race for The Year’s Most Inapt Analogy. Predictably, on Wednesday, CNN This Morning raked the House Republicans over the coals for their failure to get the necessary votes to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, or pass a stand-alone Israel aid bill.
Speaking of rakes, co-anchor Phil Mattingly kicked things off with this mocking depiction of Republicans: “This was clearly another day of a full-on pursuit of the Republican agenda of sequentially finding rakes and then stepping on them.”
Commenting on the situation, Avlon dropped a World War II analogy that was contextually dubious at best:
[…]Whuh? Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister who met with Hitler in 1938. After agreeing to cede portions of Czechoslovakia in return for Hitler’s empty promise not to make any further territorial demands, Chamberlain infamously claimed that he had achieved “peace for our time.”
Chamberlain had gone down in history as the embodiment of the failure of appeasement.
How Avlon analogized that to events in the House yesterday is beyond comprehension.
When a second impeachment vote a week later was successful, Christy returned to whine that it was criticized in a Feb. 14 post:
According to NBC Late Night host Seth Meyers, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is his most frequent guest and the two joined forces again on Tuesday to laugh at Republican misfortunes on the first vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that failed, while labeling the second one “terrible” and “one of the most… shocking abuses of procedure I’ve seen.”
Meyers lamented, “And it seems like the only thing the House actually wants to do about the border is impeach Secretary Mayorkas, which they failed to do, but they’re going to try again because they didn’t miss by many votes the first time.”
Cracking himself up, Hayes recalled, “By the way, you’ve done this on the show, I think, but the way they missed the first time is amazing. Al Green, Democratic congressman from Texas, had surgery, literally rolled up to the Capitol in a wheelchair and hospital scrubs. To cast the deciding vote to defend Mayorkas.”
By the time the show aired in the early hours of the morning, Mayorkas had been impeached, but when the show was taped, that was still in the future, as Hayes continued, “Now they’re going to do it again, and the reason they’re doing it again is because they might lose the one vote of their majority if the special election today goes the wrong way, and they are impeaching a cabinet secretary for the first time in 150 years.”
When Hayes pointed out that “There is not even the pretext of a scandal or a high crime, misdemeanor. There is a policy difference at the level of policy, anger at the way that things have been implemented,” Christy grumbled in response: “Perhaps Democrats should’ve considered that when they started plotting to impeach Donald Trump before he even took office.” We don’t recall Christy being angry when a right-wing congresswoman introduced a resolution to impeach President Biden on literally the day after he became president.