The Republican-dominated Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15 to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The standard for impeachment is high, but Republicans want to humiliate the Biden administration by impeaching a Cabinet Secretary for the first time in 150 years.

Given the Republicans’ slim majority, they will need almost every Republican vote to impeach Mayorkas.

The Democratic majority in the Senate will certainly defeat anything this absurd from the House.

The G.O.P. was plowing forward without producing evidence that Mr. Mayorkas committed a crime or acts of corruption, arguing instead that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed…

“Neither of the impeachment charges the committee will consider today are a high crime or misdemeanor,” said Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s most senior Democrat. He added that House Republicans “don’t want progress. They don’t want solutions. They want a political issue.”

At least one House Republican is skeptical.

“I’m a ‘lean no’ at this point,” Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he feared that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would damage Congress institutionally and be “moving in the wrong direction.”

“To say that someone was incompetent — we wouldn’t have anybody in Congress, if the standard was competence,” Mr. Buck added.