For now, Pete Hegseth keeps his job. On Tuesday evening a 211-204 House majority decided to send the articles of impeachment against the defence secretary to the Judiciary Committee, a procedural step that in practice buries them. With the current Congress running out in January, nobody expects the panel to touch them.
The challenge came from inside the Republican ranks. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a long-standing opponent of the Iran war, drafted eight articles. They accuse Hegseth of waging that war since February without approval from Congress, of authorising deadly attacks at sea on vessels the Pentagon linked to narcotics smuggling, and of retaliating against Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. When the roll was called, Massie found himself isolated: no other member of his party joined him in siding with the Democrats against the referral, while upwards of a dozen lawmakers, eleven of them Democrats, skipped the vote.
Hegseth used his first Pentagon briefing in six months to hit back, dismissing the effort as a “farce” and “sabotage” and insisting the charges amounted to policy disputes rather than high crimes. The president, for his part, posted a gleeful victory message online. Massie admitted afterwards to being “disappointed”, though not caught off guard.
The fight may simply move to a new arena. Democrats, fresh from their midterm victory, will control both chambers from January, and Hakeem Jeffries, who leads them in the House, promised that this was “just the beginning”. Massie, whose seat goes to someone else in January after a primary defeat, now plans to push for a showdown over war powers. Texas senator Ted Cruz, from the president’s own party, went further and predicted that Hegseth would either quit or be fired.
Impeaching a cabinet member remains rare. The House has taken that step against just two of them so far, William Belknap in 1876 and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024, and neither ended up losing his post through a Senate conviction.
