Mayorkas is the second Cabinet member to be impeached, but the first to still be in office. When the House impeached William Belknap in 1876, he had resigned as war secretary just hours earlier. So when the Senate tried the case, Belknap was a private citizen.
On March 2, 1876, Rep. Hiester Clymer, D-Pa., rose to speak on the House floor. Clymer, who chaired the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, said his panel had uncovered “official corruption and crimes such as has no parallel in our own history, or, so far as I know, that of any other country.”
The man at fault, Clymer said, was Belknap, who was war secretary in President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration. This was the Gilded Age, and Belknap was known for “extravagant Washington parties,” which raised questions, seeing as he was on a government salary.
The source of Belknap’s wealth was a kickback scheme orchestrated by his first wife, in which she helped businessman Caleb Marsh get an appointment to a trading post in Oklahoma. The man in that job, John Evans, struck a deal with Marsh: Evans would get to keep his lucrative job, but he’d provide $12,000 annually in payments, split evenly between Marsh and the Belknaps.
Clymer’s committee had Marsh on the record explaining the situation. After he entered evidence into the record, Clymer moved for a vote on impeachment. But there was a catch. Just hours earlier, Belknap had raced to the White House and begged Grant to accept his resignation, which the president did.
After a floor debate over whether the House could impeach an official who had resigned, the House ended up doing just that by voting unanimously to impeach Belknap. “THE DISGRACED SECRETARY,” read The New York Times headline the following day.
The Senate trial began in April and featured testimony from 40 witnesses. While a majority of senators voted against Belknap on all five articles, the Senate didn’t reach the two-thirds threshold necessary for conviction on any of them.