House votes to shelve impeachment effort against Defense Secretary Hegseth

The House of Representatives voted 211 to 204 on Tuesday to refer a resolution impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Judiciary Committee, a procedural move that effectively shelves, for now, an unusual effort by a Republican lawmaker to remove a sitting member of President Trump's Cabinet. The vote capped a 24-hour sprint that began Monday when Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, filed a privileged resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, forcing the chamber to act within two legislative days under House rules.

Massie was the only Republican to vote against sending the measure to committee, joining all but a handful of Democrats in trying to keep it alive for a direct up-or-down vote, according to CBS News and Al Jazeera, which both reported the 211-204 tally. Seven Republicans and eleven Democrats did not vote. Rep. Pete Aguilar, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, said party leadership had not formally whipped the vote, a sign Democrats treated the referral as a foregone conclusion rather than a fight they expected to win.

Eight articles, rooted in the Iran war

Massie's resolution runs more than 30 pages and centers on the administration's military campaign against Iran earlier this year. Its lead articles accuse Hegseth of violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973 by directing hostilities without the declaration of war or statutory authorization the law requires, and of continuing operations after Congress, in Massie's telling, had not granted authority to do so. Later articles extend to strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, military activity in Venezuela connected to the capture of Nicolás Maduro, operations in Yemen, and an allegation that Hegseth retaliated against Sen. Mark Kelly, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, over a video in which Kelly told service members they could refuse unlawful orders.

It is the second impeachment push Hegseth has faced this year. In April, Rep. Yassamin Ansari and a group of House Democrats filed their own resolution charging him with "high crimes and misdemeanors" across six articles covering the Iran war, alleged violations of the law of armed conflict, mishandling of sensitive military information, obstruction of congressional oversight and abuse of power. That measure, filed as H.Res. 1177 and referred to the Judiciary Committee the same day, never received a floor vote. The Pentagon dismissed it at the time, and press secretary Kingsley Wilson has used similar language this week, calling the broader push an attempt to generate headlines rather than a serious legal case.

• 211-204: the vote to send Massie's impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee, effectively ending the effort for this Congress
• 8: articles of impeachment in Massie's resolution, most tied to the Iran war and the War Powers Resolution of 1973
• 1: Republicans who voted against the referral motion — Massie himself
• 18: lawmakers who did not vote (7 Republicans, 11 Democrats)

A lawmaker with little left to lose

Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican who has repeatedly broken with his party's leadership over spending, surveillance and war powers, is not returning to Congress next year. He lost his May primary to a Trump-backed challenger after a prolonged feud with the president that included Massie's push to force the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. That has left him with limited remaining leverage inside the House Republican Conference but also little incentive to avoid a fight leadership did not want. Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the resolution as "a political gambit for attention" and pressed colleagues to dispose of it quickly rather than let it consume floor time, according to CBS News's live coverage of the vote.

The episode is the latest in a string of controversies that have dogged Hegseth's tenure at the Pentagon, including his use of the Signal messaging app to discuss a pending strike on Houthi targets in Yemen and Democratic senators' repeated, unsuccessful demands that he release video of the Caribbean boat strikes. Those earlier fights fed directly into both impeachment resolutions and have kept Hegseth a recurring target on Capitol Hill even as the White House has stood behind him. After Tuesday's vote, Hegseth called the effort "a political spectacle" and "a farce," according to CBS News.

Reaction splits along, and sometimes across, party lines

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has backed impeachment and said after Tuesday's vote that the outcome would not be the end of the matter.

It's just the beginning.

Massie, who had pushed for a direct vote rather than a committee burial, said he was disappointed by the result, telling reporters that members of Congress "know what to do" but "just can't bring themselves to do it," according to CBS News's account of his floor comments. On the Senate side, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who voted to confirm Hegseth in January 2025 and has since called that vote the biggest regret of his career, has become one of the few Republicans publicly supportive of pushing Hegseth out of office. Any Senate trial, however, would require a two-thirds vote to convict, a threshold neither this year's House effort nor the April one has come close to testing.

What happens next

Tuesday's referral sends Massie's resolution to the Judiciary Committee, where, like the Democrats' April measure before it, it is likely to sit without action for the remainder of this Congress. But the political arithmetic in Washington is set to shift. Voters handed Democrats control of both the House and the Senate in last week's midterm elections, and the new Congress convenes in January. Jeffries and other Democratic leaders have signaled they intend to revisit impeachment articles against Hegseth once they control the House committee process and the floor calendar, meaning Tuesday's vote may prove to be a delay rather than a final resolution. Any renewed push would still face the same two-thirds Senate hurdle for an actual removal from office, a bar no impeachment of a Cabinet-level official has cleared in modern American history.