The House on Tuesday blocked an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his conduct of the war against Iran, voting 211-204 to refer the articles to the Republican-led Judiciary Committee — a move that effectively kills the push with barely two months left before Democrats take over both chambers.
Dissident Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the only member of his party to vote against sending the measure to committee. More than a dozen members, including 11 Democrats, missed the vote entirely. Because impeachment resolutions can carry over past the end of a congressional term, Democrats will be able to revive their own effort against Hegseth once they hold the gavel in January — but Tuesday's vote denies Massie the quicker, bipartisan reckoning he had been pushing for.
In eight articles of impeachment introduced Monday, Massie accused Hegseth of "breaking the law" by waging war on Iran for more than 90 days without congressional authorization, and of overseeing "extrajudicial killings" in strikes on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean that the administration says were carrying drugs. Massie, who lost his own primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed challenger, has criticized the Iran war since it began in February and separately clashed with the White House over the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
Hegseth, holding his first Pentagon news briefing in six months, called the impeachment bid a "farce" and "sabotage," arguing it signaled to US adversaries "that the United States will actually punish its own warriors and its own civilian leadership for successfully executing lawful military operations." He said Massie was driven by policy disagreements, "not high crimes, not misdemeanours, not treason, not bribery."
My diagnosis of Congress is these people know what to do. They just can't bring themselves to do it, even when it would benefit them politically.
Rep. Thomas Massie, after the vote
President Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social, writing that the effort "has miserably FAILED" and crediting what he called "Victories in Venezuela and Iran" and record military recruitment for Hegseth's "EXONERATION." House Speaker Mike Johnson had predicted earlier in the day that the bid would fail. Still, Hegseth's standing in the administration remains an open question: Texas Senator Ted Cruz said Tuesday he expected the defense secretary to resign or be fired before long, one of several Republicans who have questioned how much longer Hegseth can hold on even as he survives, for now, on Capitol Hill.
