By virtue of this history and precedent, calls to impeach Mayorkas have been widely denounced among experts, including such conservatives as Michael Chertoff, Ross Garber, and Jonathan Turley. Even the Wall Street Journal opposes the Mayorkas impeachment.

If sanity had prevailed, the House would have refused to charge Mayorkas. In fact, sanity did prevail the first time around. It took a second attempt for House Republicans to cross this Rubicon—a breach of precedent they managed by a mere one-vote majority and despite impassioned, bipartisan opposition. In passing the articles, House Republican leaders further undermined the seriousness of their efforts by naming Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as one of the managers to prosecute charges against Mayorkas.

The action now shifts to the Senate, which wields “the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” The Senate enjoys broad latitude in deciding how to exercise that power. Nothing in the Constitution—or in the Senate rules—requires that every impeachment trial involve full-blown proceedings of the sort that occurred during the recent trials of former President Donald J. Trump.

Nor would such a trial be appropriate here. Articles of impeachment are intended as deadly serious business, not platforms for political spectacle and policy dispute. The charges against Mayorkas are so plainly defective under the Constitution that a trial would merely waste Senate time. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine what a trial on these spaghetti-at-the-wall charges would involve. House Republicans apparently hope to put the entirety of federal immigration enforcement up for debate, but in no rational sense would that be a “trial.”

Rewarding such behavior with hours of Senate floor time would only invite further degradation of the meaning and purpose of impeachment, which was intended as a solemn power. The Senate should send a message that impeachment is reserved for great and dangerous offenses against the nation; it is not a tool for a House majority to secure free publicity for policy attacks on an administration.

The Senate has several options to achieve that goal. Most straightforward, it could decide the case quickly and fairly based on a motion to dismiss the charges—which could be heard at the very outset of the trial (either immediately after the Senate convenes as a court of impeachment or, alternatively, following a short adjournment to allow the issuance of a summons to Mayorkas and the submission of pretrial motions).

There is clear precedent for a motion to dismiss articles of impeachment. During its trial of President Bill Clinton, the Senate adopted rules providing for a motion to dismiss following initial evidentiary presentations by the parties (and Sen. Robert Byrd, D–West Virginia, ultimately offered such a motion). During the first Trump impeachment trial, the Senate allowed the parties to file motions before presenting their cases; it was widely expected that Trump would move to dismiss the charges, but he declined to do so after meeting heavy Republican resistance. In the second Trump impeachment case, the Senate adopted rules that required the parties to debate a dispositive legal issue before the trial itself began. Finally, the Senate addressed pretrial motions to dismiss in the cases of Judge Alcee Hastings and Judge Thomas Porteous.

Although the Senate has not previously granted a motion to dismiss articles of impeachment, it has never been presented with charges so glaringly defective as those against Mayorkas. These articles thus deserve different and less deferential treatment.

In voting on a motion to dismiss, senators can draw guidance from judicial practice. For instance, they can ask whether the articles allege conduct that (even if proven true) would fail to qualify as “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” They can ask whether each of the articles fails to properly allege a single unified offense or course of conduct, and instead bundles an array of unrelated accusations into a prolix omnibus charge that raises grievous due process or other concerns. They can ask whether compound charges like these create an undue risk that a conviction might occur without two-thirds of the Senate agreeing on any specific factual accusation. And they can consider a range of other legal issues related to the substance and structure of the articles, as well as the adequacy of the process afforded to Mayorkas in the House’s rush to conclude the impeachment proceedings.

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Apart from a motion to dismiss, the Senate has two separate options to avoid needless floor proceedings. The first would be to resolve the matter through a point of order. The leading precedent here comes from the second Trump trial, where Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, raised a point of order to question the Senate’s jurisdiction to try a former president—and where the Senate then voted on the issue. If a point of order is raised in the Mayorkas proceedings, the Senate will need to decide whether articles of impeachment may properly be challenged in that manner, or whether points of order are reserved only for limited purposes (e.g., challenges bearing on the Senate’s jurisdiction). That issue would likely go to the full Senate for resolution, though the parliamentarian might also play a role.

Alternatively, as authorized by its rules and Supreme Court precedent, the Senate could form a special committee to handle trial proceedings (including any pretrial motions). That is how the Senate has tried several judicial impeachments—though setting up any such committee requires time and energy, and that process would itself likely spark publicity and political conflict. If the Senate takes that road, its committee would ultimately report back to the full Senate with a record of proceedings, and the full Senate could then conduct further activity or simply vote on the articles.

Whichever of these vehicles the Senate chooses, it should quickly dispose of the Mayorkas impeachment. There is no sound reason for these charges to reach a trial, and there are powerful reasons to reject them outright.

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