Rep. Elise Stefanik, in a show of spectacular hypocrisy, is among House Republicans who are pushing for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

This call for an impeachment of a Cabinet secretary is extremely rare. It’s happened only once before in U.S. history, in 1876, after a defense secretary was charged with receiving kickbacks in government contracts.

Stefanik’s push for Mayorkas’ impeachment comes mere weeks after she voted against the impeachment of the disgraced former GOP Rep. George Santos because, in her own words, it would set a “dangerous precedent.” Santos was the sixth representative to be impeached in history; the first since the Civil War to be expelled without a criminal conviction.

Santos was charged with 23 federal counts. The evidence supporting those charges continues to mount. Much of his background, which he campaigned on, was completely fabricated. If he were to continue to serve in Congress as Stefanik desired — effectively keeping Republicans’ majority in the House from getting smaller — he would have continued to pull a public salary despite his lies and further discredit the important work of the House.

“Every day that Joe Biden and Secretary Mayorkas refuse to secure our borders they fail the American people, sacrificing our nation’s safety, security, and sovereignty,” Stefanik said at a press conference in Washington, D.C. this week.

Mayorkas, a respected attorney and Jewish immigrant whose family fled Cuba to the U.S. after the Cuban Revolution, has been charged with no real crimes by a law enforcement agency. Instead, as a bipartisan effort by Senators aims to negotiate a border security package, Republicans in the House seem to have given up on compromises and good faith negotiations, instead opting to try to push Mayorkas out over a policy dispute. House Republicans are claiming that Mayorkas is not enforcing federal immigration laws. The Department of Homeland Security has called Republicans’ push for Mayorkas’ impeachment “baseless and pointless.”

The Constitution specifies that “high crimes and misdemeanors” warrant impeachment — is there actual evidence to prove that Mayorkas’ conduct rises to that level? If so, Republicans must make that evidence public and clear.

Last month, U.S. Border Patrol was expected to take a quarter of a million people entering the U.S. illegally into custody. There were a record number of arrivals at the southern border in December: 300,000. This trend’s genesis spans further back than Biden. After Trump ended his zero-tolerance policy in 2018 following public outrage over migrant children being removed from their families, the Washington Post reports that smugglers “quickly seized on” the attention that the outrage had generated. Despite Trump’s other hard-line policies, annual illegal crossing apprehensions peaked at 851,508 in 2019, a 12-year high, according to the Pew Research Center. But even before Trump was elected, in 2014, the number of migrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol agents had overwhelmed the agency’s resources, prompting the Obama administration to open a new border processing facility with a capacity for 1,500 people — and the infamous “cages” to hold them, according to the Washington Post. This vexing issue has spanned multiple presidencies and just seems to continue to get worse.

But until there’s evidence to prove a direct link between Mayorkas’ conduct and the rising illegal crossings, this effort by House Republicans seems a useless, unproductive exercise in bomb throwing.

Despite what members of the House Freedom Caucus may want to believe, this sort of approach is clearly not working and will not work.

House Republicans, after ousting their own speaker last year and failing for weeks to agree on a replacement, have become mired by infighting. Last year, under a Republican majority, Congress passed just 27 bills. That makes this Congress the least productive since 1931-33. This is a disgrace to the GOP and not reflective of the party’s great history.

If Republicans hope to keep control of the House after this year, they must demonstrate to voters that they are effective leaders who can make the sort of compromises necessary to make meaningful progress.