Thomas Massie’s Attempt To Impeach Pete Hegseth Is Derailed

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will keep his job—at least for now.

A congressional motion to impeach Hegseth over his handling of the Iran War and other conduct, like the Pentagon’s extrajudicial killings of suspected drug traffickers, failed to clear a key procedural vote on Tuesday evening in the House of Representatives.

The House voted 211-204, largely along party lines, to refer the impeachment effort to a committee, effectively killing the proposal.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who led the impeachment effort, was the only Republican to vote against sending it to committee.

Massie said on the House floor on Monday that Hegseth had “demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the Constitution, if allowed to remain in office.”

Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth. Four of them focus on the war in Iran. Massie claims Hegseth violated the War Powers Resolution by launching the war without evidence of an imminent threat against the United States, continuing the war after Congress passed a resolution ordering the conflict to end, and ignoring the withdrawal deadlines Congress set in that order. Hegseth has “treated mandatory statutory deadlines as discretionary,” the articles claim.

The final article on Iran has to do with the February 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, which killed more than 100 civilians, many of them children. Pentagon officials ignored warnings about outdated intelligence in the lead-up to that attack.

Massie’s fifth article charges Hegseth with ordering “extrajudicial killings” in counternarcotics operations off the coast of Venezuela. On the House floor, Massie said that Hegseth “asserted a unilateral power to determine who may live and who may die” without authorization from Congress or evidence of a clear threat to American forces or interests.

Other articles of impeachment focus on American military conduct in Venezuela and Yemen, and on Hegseth’s attempt to illegally retaliate against Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.) after Kelly criticized him.

During a fiery press conference on Tuesday morning, Hegseth said the orders he’d given during the Iran War were legal and ordered by Trump—and, in fairness, the commander in chief probably should be the person held accountable for the war.

Despite the failed impeachment, Hegseth’s future as the head of the Pentagon is uncertain. Trump said this week that he would “stand by” Hegseth despite the impeachment effort, but the president has also said that Hegseth was “one of the guys most responsible” for the war with Iran, which played a major role in Republicans’ midterm election losses a week ago. Democrats could also try to oust Hegseth after they assume control of Congress in January.

“After Tuesday’s electoral shellacking, GOP members should be looking for clear opportunities to distance themselves from Trump’s disastrous and unnecessary war,” wrote Reason‘s Gene Healy last week as he urged lawmakers to impeach Hegseth. Doing that would serve an important secondary purpose too: reinvigorating “a valuable constitutional weapon.”

It’s a shame that Republicans in the House missed their best opportunity to do that. Voters sent a clear, decisive signal about the Iran War last week. Congress should listen to that, rather than protecting a rogue defense secretary who remains a threat to the constitutional order.