Mike Gallagher’s Profile In Courage

Mike Gallagher. Photo is in the Public Domain.

The proposal to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas had been promised by Republicans since they won a majority of the House of Representatives in 2022. And then, in a stunning surprise, the resolution was defeated because of a no vote by Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher, the 8th District Republican who has been seen as one of the bright lights of the party.

MAGA Republicans, who had fervently pushed the impeachment as a way to dramatize problems on America’s southern border, and deliver a rebuke to the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden, were outraged.

Soon Gallagher “was swarmed on the House floor by his colleagues, who engaged in an apparent last-ditch attempt to change his mind,” the Washington Post reported. “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has tried multiple times to force the House to expedite impeaching Mayorkas, was spotted shouting at Gallagher. She was soon joined by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee who spearheaded the investigation into Mayorkas. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.), a close ally of [House]Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.), then animatedly tried to persuade Gallagher to flip his vote as Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) listened in…

“Gallagher stood listening with his arms folded across his chest as he intermittently gesticulated and shook his head. He was unmoved.”

After having convinced two Republicans sitting on the fence — Reps. David Joyce (R-Ohio) and Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) — to back impeachment, Johnson told the media he was confident his party had the votes needed for impeachment.

But they didn’t have Gallagher, “who stayed mum about how he would vote, hours after warning his GOP colleagues behind closed doors that impeaching the first cabinet secretary in 150 years would open ‘Pandora’s Box.’”

After the impeachment proposal failed to pass Gallagher released a statement explaining his vote.

“Creating a new, lower standard for impeachment, one without any clear limiting principle, won’t secure the border or hold Biden accountable and will set a dangerous new precedent that will be weaponized against future Republican administrations,” he said.

Gallagher made it clear he was unlikely to change his mind if the proposal was brought back again for a vote, writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed published after the vote Tuesday night reiterating his opposition. “The first article of impeachment lays out in grueling detail Mr. Mayorkas’s manifest incompetence,” Gallagher wrote. “But incompetence doesn’t rise to the level of high crimes or misdemeanors.”

Gallagher argued that the “maladministration” standard that impeachment proponents supported would put every future Cabinet official at risk of impeachment.

And it might actually help Biden, Gallagher argued. “If Mr. Mayorkas were removed, his replacement would also implement Mr. Biden’s disastrous border policies,” he warned. “If anything, impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would absolve Mr. Biden of blame for his own policies.”

Was there any other reason for Gallagher’s stand? David Dayen, writing for The American Prospect, has noted that Mayorkas had “just got the ball rolling on an action plan related to one of Gallagher’s biggest priorities, related to his work on the congressional Select Committee on China.”

Gallagher sought protections for the Uyghur minority in China, backing stronger enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed on a bipartisan vote in 2022, and had “expressed frustration over lack of enforcement of the law, leading to goods made with forced labor entering the country.” And last week Mayorkas asked the federal Customs and Border Protection, along with Homeland Security Investigations, to create a “comprehensive enforcement action plan” to take on the issue, which surely pleased Gallagher.

This is not the first time Gallagher has taken a principled stand in opposition to hard-core MAGA Republicans. He was one of the three members of Wisconsin’s Republican congressional delegation (along with Glenn Grothman and Bryan Steil) who did not support the effort to overturn the legal election of Joe Biden. And he was the most outspoken of the delegation in condemning the Capitol riot, saying “This is insane, I have not seen anything like this since I deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008.” He also blamed President Donald Trump for the problem, saying “The president needs to call it off…. It’s over. The election’s over, and the objectors need to stop meddling with the primal forces of our democracy here.”

Yet Gallagher soon tacked in the other direction, joining every other member of the state’s Republican congressional delegation to vote against the second impeachment of Trump. “His speech was a head-spinning feat of contradictory rhetoric that both condemned and mollified Trump,” as I wrote at the time.

Gallagher, first elected in 2017, has always styled himself as less ideological than many Republicans. His push for protection of the Uyghur people was part of bipartisan effort also pursued by the ranking Democrat on the Select Committee on China, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.

Gallagher lives in Allouez in Brown County, and has a district centered in the Fox Valley that is gerrymandered to easily withstand Democratic challenges: he won by 28 points in 2020 and faced no Democratic challenger in 2022. But that, conversely, might make him more vulnerable to a primary challenge from a hard-right Republican. His occasional willingness to buck MAGA ideology has surely been noticed by Trump, who never forgives or forgets. Gallagher’s vote, in short, took courage, and stood in stark contrast to the yeas of other Wisconsin Republicans.