Tester confronts Mayorkas over border: 'You need to step up'

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who is a key vote on the question of whether the Senate will hold a full impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, confronted Mayorkas about the southern border at a hearing this week.

Tester, who is also one of the most vulnerable senators up for reelection, directed some of the harshest criticism of any Senate Democrat at Mayorkas when the secretary appeared before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Wednesday.

“All you have to see is what’s gone on at the southern border, and you know that we’re in a situation that needs immediate repair, immediate fixing, immediate overhaul,” Tester said, glaring at the embattled Homeland Security secretary, who was impeached by the House in February.

“We are seeing a high number of encounters at the southern border. We all talk about fentanyl into this country,” he said.

“The fact is the border needs to be fixed, and we need to step up as Congress, the administration needs to step up, you need to step up," Tester said, his voice rising in volume.

“If we’re able to do that, we can fix it, but it’s going to take continuous due diligence on the border to make it happen,” he declared.

Tester is emerging as a pivotal vote on whether the Senate will immediately dismiss the two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas that House Republicans are scheduled to present to the upper chamber next week.

Tester said he’s willing to look at the documents the House impeachment managers present, and he is warning that the Senate will have to take a serious look at them if they’re not just a political stunt.

“Now, if the House didn’t do something politically, which would be kind of a shock to me, then we’ve got to look at it seriously,” he told reporters this week.

“I got to look at the papers,” he said, referring to the charges laid out in the articles of impeachment. “In the end, I just want to read the papers, refamiliarize [myself] with what the House did … and then we’ll make a determination what we do.”

Most Democrats and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have strenuously pushed back on the impeachment, with a DHS spokesperson saying it was conducted "without a shred of evidence or legitimate constitutional grounds."

Senate Democrats control 51 seats, which means Tester could help derail a motion to table the impeachment charges if all 49 Republicans vote to proceed with a full trial.

But so far there are multiple Republicans who won’t say whether they would vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment without first hearing arguments from the House GOP managers. They include Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Tester told reporters this week that he’s getting pummeled by attack ads on the situation on the border that are trying to turn the tide in the Montana Senate race. Businessman and Navy veteran Tim Sheehy is challenging Tester in one of the GOP's top pickup opportunities.

The Montana senator alluded to the ad barrage during his grilling of Mayorkas at the Appropriations hearing.

He then demanded to know what else Mayorkas will do to try to secure the border.

“I called on you and President Biden to use your executive powers to do whatever you could do to secure that border, as many of my colleagues have talked about here. So my question for you is, does the Administration have any plans to use any additional executive powers to address the situation at the southern border?” he asked.

Mayorkas said he and the president are thinking about what executive actions they can take to limit the flow of migrants across the southern border but cautioned they are limited by the courts in how far they can go.

“I should note that the effort to close the border through executive action is something the prior administration tried, and they were enjoined from doing so,” Mayorkas said, arguing that Congress needs to reform the nation’s asylum laws and give Biden more emergency authority to close the border, priorities that were included in the bipartisan border security bill Republicans defeated on the Senate floor in February.

Mayorkas said that bill would have been “transformative.”

The Homeland Security secretary acknowledged “there are many other fixes that need to be made” to the legal immigration system, but he hailed the reforms that stalled on the Senate floor as an “extraordinary legislative measure.”

Tester bashed Republicans for derailing that bill, accusing his GOP colleagues of playing politics in order to use the border crisis as an issue in the upcoming election.

“Congress had its opportunity to do something about the southern border — and the northern border, I might add, Montana being a northern border state, that's important … Congress decided to play politics with it, and in the last 60 days — the week after we failed to pass that bill, there were times when 6,500 people were coming across the border and could have been stopped if we passed this bill, and we chose to play politics with it,” he said.