Today the House voted 214-213, on party lines, to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vindicating their humiliating recent failure to impeach him. It is the first time in history that a sitting American cabinet member has been impeached. The tiny GOP House majority was in an admittedly tight spot on the issue of immigration, the party having demanded legislation on border control by tying it to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Taiwan aid, getting it from the Senate after months of negotiation, and refusing to bring it to the floor for a vote, on orders of their boss, an impulsive man with a very busy court schedule.

Prior to the vote the NY Times ran a related article, using uncharacteristically direct language to describe the political party that is a big tent for every kind of American hater and bigot (along with the millions of very fine people who are neither haters nor bigots). The very un-Times like headline and lede reads: On Capitol Hill, Republicans Use Bigoted Attacks Against Political Foes; House and Senate Republicans have denigrated fellow lawmakers, Biden administration officials and witnesses in racist ways, both in casual comments and in official settings. The article offered a sampling of bigoted spoutings by the GOP, all in the course of a week. Here’s the bit about Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: 

Around the same time, House Republicans released their report on impeachment charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security secretary who is the first Latino to lead his department. Using unusually loaded language for a committee report, the panel described its action as “deporting Secretary Mayorkas from his position.”

In private, the language was uglier. During a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the panel’s chairman, referred to Mr. Mayorkas as a “reptile with no balls” because of his refusal to resign from his post, according to Politico. A White House official condemned the statement, noting that Mr. Mayorkas is Jewish and that the comment echoed an antisemitic trope.

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A reptile with no balls. What are you going to do with a creature like that?