Trampling on the Fallen

 Well, so the House Republicans have managed to impeach Mayorkas, after trying and failing to do so a week ago. It's like it's become a Tuesday ritual at this point. I finish my late afternoon class, grab a tuna fish sandwich for dinner, and check the news on my phone to see that the House is once again trying to pillory Mayorkas. No doubt, they feel like this second vote is a kind of vindication for them, after their humiliating defeat last week, when House Speaker Mike Johnson elected to hold the vote apparently without actually having the support necessary to carry it through. Now, he can crow about how they finally managed to succeed in finishing what they started. 

But in truth, it is no vindication, as anyone can see. All the House Republicans have managed to do is to make themselves appear even more pathetic and ludicrous. They are like a group of clumsy assassins who botched their first attempt to stab someone, and scampered off in fear and flight, only to return at night to stab their victim while he slept. They are like a gang of bullies who set upon an innocent civilian who managed to fend them off, and then returned a night later with an even bigger gang of bullies to ensure the odds were in their favor. 

They did indeed manage to do it. They impeached Mayorkas. Just as a big enough gang can bully any victim, no matter how hard the latter fights back. But they hardly looked tough or admirable doing it. Some of their own members even continued to object. They stood by protesting, as the gang leader whaled on the defeated foe, and said "enough already; he's already on the ground; what's wrong with you?"

In short, there was a kind of hysterical cowardice to the GOP leadership's repeated, monomaniacal efforts to carry out this utterly meaningless symbolic vote and impeach this one official as a kind of burnt offering. Nor does anyone involved think there is actually some plausible legal theory according to which Mayorkas could be judged to have committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." The worst Republicans could throw at him was that he "failed to enforce the law"—which means essentially that they are prosecuting a prosecutor for exercising prosecutorial discretion. After all, every DHS chief in the department's brief history could be impeached on the same specious grounds. Congress has never appropriated enough funds to deport literally everyone who could be removed—and thank goodness for that!

What is especially pathetic is that the House GOP thought all of this would somehow make them look strong and better able to govern. They are like Yeats's "Leaders of the Crowd," who monger as scandal "whatever their loose fantasy invent," and who pretend to themselves that the dreck and sewage of their false imaginings will impress others as an "abounding [...] Helicon." Look, they say, we defamed Mayorkas! We managed to drag his name through the mud on totally made-up charges, through a process that even our own members admitted was shamefully partisan. Aren't you proud? Don't we look great? 

So it is with all those who, instead of erecting something positive themselves—instead of proposing some sort of solution—choose to devote their time to "pull[ing] down established honour" (as Yeats puts it). As Matthew Arnold wrote in a similar vein, the "eternal spirit" of the cowardly mob is that which seeks to "swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage [and ....] trample savagely on the fallen[.]"

The mob leaders, the ones doing the trampling on the already fallen, and the pulling down of established honor—they always think that they are making themselves great by doing so. But in reality, they only emphasize their own smallness, and thereby give an unintended dignity to their victims. They have even managed to make me feel for Mayorkas. This doesn't come easily. I never really forgave him, after all, for all the Biden administration's anti-asylum policies: for enforcing Title 42 expulsions, and for proposing the administration's rule to restrict asylum eligibility. 

But congratulations, Republicans, you have managed to make him into a great man, through your own overwhelming pettiness. He has become a martyr, simply because the braying multitude has chosen him for their scapegoat. He is like the priest Urbain Grandier in Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, who begins the story as a scamp and playboy, but who acquires in the course of the tale extraordinary dignity and humanity, simply because he suffers injustice at the hands of bigots, and endures their taunts and persecutions with dignity. As he stares down these bogus attempts to defame him, he maintains what Baudelaire once called the "calm and dignified mien/ that damns the whole multitude around the scaffold." So it is with Mayorkas. And so, well done Republicans. You have shown how small and irrelevant you are; and you have only managed to make Secretary Mayorkas more admirable by comparison.