WASHINGTON — Laying the impeachment groundwork for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a House committee on Thursday heard from parents whose tearful testimony sought to link government border policy to their daughters’ deaths and from a law professor warning off the effort.

Committee Chairman Mark Green is heading steadfast toward a vote on Mayorkas’ impeachment by the end of the month, setting up action by the full House as soon as February — which would be a first for a Cabinet official in nearly 150 years.

Green, a Tennessee Republican, opened the second impeachment hearing saying “no American is safe” under Mayorkas’ handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, with a record number of illegal crossings. He argued that the secretary’s “egregious misconduct and failure to fulfill his oath of office” are grounds for impeachment.

But the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who has insisted that policy differences with President Joe Biden are not impeachable grounds, was backed up by one of the witnesses, Princeton University law professor Deborah Pearlstein.

She said no branch of the U.S. government has more power than the Congress to set policy and that, with years of inaction on border legislation, those powers have “gone unused.”

Election interference: The federal judge overseeing the 2020 election interference case against former President Donald Trump rejected Trump lawyers’ bid Thursday to hold special counsel Jack Smith’s team in contempt for actions prosecutors took after the judge put the case on hold. But the judge said no further “substantive” court filings should be submitted without permission.

Trump’s lawyers had accused prosecutors of “outrageous conduct” for turning over to the defense thousands of pages of evidence and filing a motion after the judge paused the case while Trump appeals his presidential immunity claim. The defense said prosecutors were violating the court’s order, done so Trump can pursue his claim in higher courts.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said in her ruling that her Dec. 13 order pausing the case did not “clearly and unambiguously” prohibit those actions by Smith’s team. However, she agreed with Trump to bar all parties in the case from filing “any further substantive pretrial motions” without first seeking permission from the court until the pause is lifted.

The trial is scheduled to begin March 4 in Washington’s federal court but is likely to be postponed as Trump’s immunity claim winds through higher courts. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in D.C. heard arguments on the issue last week and could issue its ruling any day.

Internet access in NC: President Joe Biden unveiled $82 million for North Carolina to help connect 16,000 new households and businesses to high-speed internet, delivering an election-year pitch Thursday about policies he says are “just getting started” at improving the United States.

Biden said the work his administration is doing in North Carolina, on high-speed internet, infrastructure and more, is happening in communities across the country, regardless of the politics.

“What we’re doing here is one piece of a much bigger story,” he said, and he is keeping his promise “to be a president for all America, whether you voted for me or not.”

Biden’s campaign has made winning North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes a top priority. He narrowly lost the state in 2020 to Donald Trump.

Panel on debt: A bill to create a bipartisan commission that would tackle the nation’s soaring debt and make policy recommendations to Congress won approval Thursday from a House committee.

House Republicans are making the bill a priority, and the chairman of the House Budget Committee said “everything’s on the table” regarding possible action to slow the federal government’s increasing level of debt, now at more than $34 trillion. Many Democrats see the commission as an attempt to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The bill, approved 22-12 by the GOP-majority committee, would ask the commission to recommend ways to balance the budget at the earliest reasonable date and to improve the long-term solvency of Medicare, Social Security and other programs paid for through trust funds. The commission would have 16 members: 12 from Congress, evenly divided by party, and four outside experts who would not have voting power.

Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, have sponsored a companion measure in the Senate.

Trump prosecutor: The judge presiding over the Georgia prosecution of former President Donald Trump and others for efforts to overturn the 2020 election has set a hearing on a motion alleging that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been romantically involved with a special prosecutor she hired for the case.

In an order Thursday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee set a Feb. 15 hearing and ordered prosecutors to file their response by Feb. 2. The allegations have been seized upon by Trump and other critics of the prosecution, who have argued that the case is tainted and should be tossed out.

Defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who represents former Trump campaign staffer and onetime White House aide Michael Roman, made the allegations in a motion filed last week. She said Willis was involved in a romantic relationship with attorney Nathan Wade that created a conflict of interest and led to Willis profiting personally from the prosecution.

The motion seeks to have the indictment thrown out and to have Willis and Wade removed from the case.

Willis’ office has said they will respond to Merchant’s motion in a court filing but have not provided a timeline for that.

Attack on Syria: An airstrike on southern Syria early Thursday killed at least nine people and was probably carried out by Jordan’s air force, Syrian opposition activists said, the latest in a series of strikes in an area where cross-border drug smugglers have been active.

There was no immediate confirmation from Jordan on the strike.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said two children and at least three women were among the dead in the village of Orman.

Smugglers have used Jordan as a corridor over the past years to smuggle highly addictive Captagon amphetamines out of Syria, mainly to oil-rich Arab Gulf states.