When Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, seized the Italian region of Romagna in 1500 and made himself a duke, he appointed a mercenary brute to institute public order, a task that the condottiere accomplished with painstaking barbarism. Then Borgia executed and displayed him in the piazza. That’s how this prince won the locals’ favor; or at least it’s how Machiavelli recounts it.
Neither Borgia nor Machiavelli invented the concept of the fall guy who doubles as a reputational hoist (though theirs is the most colorful example of the second function). Apply 2021 hindsight, and it would appear that Biden’s border-security policy has been to not have one. This was a bold policy. Now, here’s a secretary of homeland security whose impeachment process is bound to magnetize with expanding pull all mainstream-media disfavor and thinking citizens’ ire over the border imbroglio — the incumbent president’s chief policy failure — right before a general election.
Then what if Biden sacks Alejandro Mayorkas — and is lauded by conservative-leaning independent voters for doing so?
There’s evidence that the president’s thinking has already taken this direction. That bluster about shutting down the border if only he were given legislative authority was smart enough: He knows that the forthcoming Senate border-security bill is moribund before it has even been introduced. When its time of death is recorded, he’ll harass House Republicans (accurately, in this case) for crying emergency but being unwilling to do anything about it quite yet. His dismissal of Mayorkas in faux frustration would complete the thought.
What most people mean by the “shut down the border” cliché isn’t a North Korean–style insulation from the rest of the planet but the detainment of those who enter the country illegally. This mandate the president already has; the law demands it, as Andrew McCarthy has repeatedly pointed out. Biden has been deficient not in authority but in will and capacity. He’ll try to camouflage it by ascribing unwillingness to act on this matter to House Republicans and (I predict) incapacity to his appointee. Should he pull it off, independents might fancy him not only relatively blameless but even decisive in a pinch.
Consider another potential use of axing Mayorkas — a way for Biden to serve Biden as well as the nation Biden has sworn to serve. His peripheral failure has metastasized inward. When the federal government refuses to enforce immigration policy, that responsibility and its consequences don’t evaporate: They must be incurred by someone else. The Supreme Court hasn’t resolved this issue. Governor Greg Abbott’s officials in Eagle Pass, Texas, may replace their concertina wire as quickly as federal agents can remove it (there have been less productive uses of government time). Biden can sell his firing of Mayorkas as a concession to Abbott in an attempt to defuse this powder keg. A Texan standoff is a dangerous thing for a president of the Union — and for the Union itself — to have.
There’s an eternity in political time between now and November. For now, economic conditions might be improving or appear to be improving enough for independents to notice. They are the ones with the votes that Biden needs to secure, or not lose, to maintain a lead in the autumn. The southwest border is where he’s on shakiest ground, so he might attempt to sidestep its short-term electoral reverberations by knocking off Mayorkas. He might have had this intention even before House Republicans decided to impeach the secretary — but their doing so multiplies the reputational benefit Biden can extract from the move.
There’s only so much blame to be had; Biden stands to avoid as much of it as Mayorkas will take. The House GOP cannot turn back now, but it can call Biden’s bluff: Pass the Senate’s border-security bill and give the president the immigration authority he pretends to want. (The proposed measure — for which the GOP can claim credit at least as well as Biden has tried to — might be imperfect but will certainly be preferable to the status quo, and nothing will prevent Republicans from designing more legislation thereafter.)
Biden’s continually timid border enforcement despite a reform that he has so pompously endorsed would expose the vacillation and impotence as his own. The president is neither fearsome nor lovely, but he can still be proven to be a Machiavellian cynic.