This was a pretty brutal takedown of the Secretary of Homeland Security, whose department didn’t even exist prior to 9/11 and does very little to effectively provide real security for the American people. Instead, it inconveniences people at airports, it facilitates rather than deters illegal immigration, including from countries whose regimes mean us harm (and there is very little vetting of illegals who make it here), and it spends its time publishing memoranda about the phantom threat of “white supremacist” domestic terrorism.

Mayorkas has become an avatar for this idiocy and failure mostly because when he shows up for hearings in the House and Senate he speaks in a comic pattern of filibuster and clear lies. But what’s true about Mayorkas is true of the entire Biden administration; it’s full of liars and incompetents who have only excuses for failures predetermined by their policies. It’s just that Mayorkas’ tragic failure at our southern border, something he simply will not own up to, is more high-profile than, say, Pete Buttigieg’s breaking of the supply chain or Jennifer Granholm’s destruction of the power grid or Lloyd Austin’s disintegrating woke military. DHS generates ugly video and awful headlines daily, unlike the others, and that’s what makes him such a prominent whipping boy for Republicans in these hearings.

And Mayorkas’ style is a distinct problem for Kennedy, who can smell bullshit as well or better than anyone in American government. Kennedy has dealt with too many obfuscating bureaucratic liars to suffer much of Mayorkas’ excuses, so when Mayorkas says he wants to ban “assault weapons” but can’t offer a definition of one other than to throw out an AK-47 as an example, that goes over poorly.

And then on the border, Mayorkas gets nowhere with Kennedy when he claims that DHS has rejected some 1.4 million illegal migrants into the country – a small minority of the people who are surging across the border. Things turn comic as Kennedy begins batting away Mayorkas’ claims by noting the simple fact that the border is wide open and nothing effective is being done to shut it down.

And it really gets good when Kennedy presses Mayorkas on the “safe third country” policy that was in place in the previous administration. Specifically, if you’re a migrant and you want to claim asylum in the U.S., but you’ve come here through an intermediary country, U.S. policy had been that you have to stay in that third country while we process your application. The Biden administration abandoned that policy, which was working, and the flood has been ceaseless since.

What’s obvious is that the Biden administration wants the flood. They’ve had all the opportunity in the world to stem it and have chosen not to. And they’ve trotted Mayorkas out to eat bullets from the American people as the flood continues, which he does with a smugness and dishonesty it’s hard for anyone to tolerate.

Kennedy doesn’t. And what results is 12 minutes of great theater.