The Weak Squeeze The Huevos
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment stunt wrecks a big MAGA myth
In the run-up to the expiration of covid-19 restrictions on those seeking asylum, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly predicted that our country would be overrun by migrant hordes from the south. Hundreds of thousands would “rush the border,” the Georgia Republican proclaimed, warning of an “Imminent Invasion!”
Since the Title 42 border policy ended last week, the average number of migrants crossing the border has dropped. Yet Greene hasn’t missed a beat: On Thursday, she introduced impeachment articles against President Biden, proclaiming that the supposed migrant invasion is central to her case. She raged: “He is a direct threat to our national security.”
This disconnect captures a truth about today’s MAGA-fied GOP: The idea that our border is under perpetual siege isn’t intended as an empirical declaration about a concrete challenge facing the country. Rather, it’s a kind of animating myth, one manufactured to mobilize political energy. In this, it’s essential to MAGA’s identity.
Greene has also called for impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the specter of an invasion after Title 42 — which allowed the government to expel most asylum seekers — has been key to her case. As CNN reports, Greene recently pressed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to take up Mayorkas’ impeachment, citing the end of the Title 42 policy as the hook.
Greene’s call for Biden’s impeachment is a joke: It’s unlikely McCarthy will seek it, and it’s not at all clear that Republicans would have the votes for it. Still, as Greene told reporters, GOP leaders have engaged in serious dialogue with her about what impeachment would look like.
What’s more, McCarthy reportedly feels genuine pressure to impeach Mayorkas, partly because of Greene’s campaign against him. All this shows that Republicans must take seriously her ability, as a leader of the party’s MAGA wing, to tap into sentiments surging inside the GOP base.
Greene and other Republicans were plainly salivating at the prospect of a large spike of migrant arrivals after the Title 42 policy ended. We can surmise this because now that this spike hasn’t materialized, House Republicans are finding all kinds of creative new ways to simply pretend that it has.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), for instance, raged at CNN for posting border-crossing numbers and claiming there’s been “still no surge” after the border policy’s end. But CNN was right: The numbers did show a drop.
Still another House Republican tweeted a video of migrants storming the border to depict Biden’s supposed failure to prepare for Title 42’s end. In fact, the video was months old and depicted an isolated group misled by disinformation about the border, which says nothing about Title 42.
Meanwhile, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) responded to the drop in crossings by demanding more concessions from Democrats on immigration. Among far-right Republicans, after the post-Title 42 surge failed to materialize, support for impeaching Mayorkas actually grew.
The drop in average border-crossings held steady through Thursday evening, a Homeland Security source told me. To be sure, we don’t know whether that will hold, and the situation is likely to grow much more challenging.
These GOP absurdities hardly exempt Biden from criticism. To secure these drops, the administration has restricted who can apply for asylum at the border in ways that renege on core human rights commitments, though he is also expanding legal pathways for migrants to come from abroad. A migrant child died in custody this week, an appalling tragedy similar to ones under President Donald Trump.
But the GOP’s immigration policies would be far, far worse. The border bill that House Republicans recently passed would gut asylum as we know it while closing off Biden’s new channels for applying from afar. And an analysis by Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) finds that it would end legal protections for migrant kids that were created by a 2008 law that many Republicans supported.
Wendy Young, president of KIND, was a Senate staffer during debates over that 2008 law. “Republicans came to the table recognizing that unaccompanied children deserved humanitarian protections,” Young told me. Now, she added, “House Republicans have become so extreme that they’re denying protection to the most vulnerable.”
The GOP addiction to border invasion imagery is such that many Republicans can see migrant children — once worthy of bipartisan assistance — only as a threat to be repulsed. They want to impeach Mayorkas — and possibly Biden — partly over a border surge that hasn’t happened. All this comes as Republicans regularly hold border photo-ops in buffoonish military gear and spend huge sums on ads depicting the border as something out of an apocalyptic video game.
The fantasy that the border is constantly in chaos has become a marker of MAGA identity. It’s a myth that MAGA Republicans want “border security” that is genuinely achievable or see the border as a policy problem to be solved in any meaningful sense. The border crisis, or at least the version that Greene and her cohorts keep invoking, exists largely in the collective MAGA imagination.
Greg Sargent is a columnist. He joined The Washington Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.
