Voto Latino, other advocacy groups call for Congress to impeach Mullin

Markwayne Mullin isn't even Secretary of Homeland Security. That's a small detail, but it matters, because it tells you how much rigor went into this letter before dozens of advocacy groups signed on to demand his impeachment. Mullin is a senator from Oklahoma. Whatever DHS is doing right now, he's not running it, and no amount of righteous letterhead changes that basic fact.

We get that detention deaths are serious and deserve real scrutiny. Nobody in this country should die in custody because of neglect, and if that's happening, Congress absolutely has a role investigating it. But the way you build public trust around that kind of claim is by getting the target right, doing the homework, and making the case with facts that hold up. Firing off a mass letter demanding impeachment of someone who doesn't hold the office you're describing suggests the letter was written to generate headlines first and figure out the details later.

That's the pattern with a lot of these advocacy pushes lately. The outrage comes first, fully formed, and the specifics get filled in afterward, sometimes badly. It doesn't help the people who actually died in custody, and it doesn't help build a credible case for reform. It mostly just tells the rest of the country that some of these organizations are less interested in accountability than in being seen demanding it.

If Voto Latino and its co-signers have a real grievance with how DHS is handling detention deaths, name the actual secretary, cite the actual cases, and make the argument on the merits. That's how you get taken seriously. Impeaching a senator for a job he doesn't have isn't oversight. It's theater, and pretty sloppy theater at that.