Republican Thomas Massie Forces House Vote to Impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth Over the Iran War

WASHINGTON — A Republican congressman has forced the United States House of Representatives to vote this week on whether to impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of waging the war against Iran without the approval of Congress, ordering unlawful killings, and abusing the power of his office. It is the most serious challenge to a sitting Pentagon chief in a century and a half, and some of Hegseth’s own party colleagues believe the attempt could succeed.

Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on Monday afternoon, 9 November, and read out a 34-page resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth. Because the resolution is privileged under House rules, Republican leaders cannot simply leave it in a committee drawer. They must act on it within two legislative days, which puts a vote on the calendar by Wednesday, 11 November, at the latest.

The filing came on the first day of Congress’s lame-duck session, the five-week stretch in which the outgoing Republican-led Congress holds the gavels before Democrats — who won control of both chambers in the midterm elections on 3 November — are sworn in on 3 January 2027. It also came just days after Republicans suffered heavy losses in those elections, defeats that President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have themselves blamed on the Iran war and the rise in petrol prices that followed it.

Hegseth said on Monday that he was “not worried” about the impeachment push and announced that he would hold a news conference at the Pentagon on Tuesday — his first formal press briefing there since May — to defend his record. Mr Trump has backed his defence secretary and condemned the impeachment effort, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday: “They want to impeach him. Very unfair. We had two wars, we won both.”

Impeachment by the House would not by itself remove Hegseth from office. That would require a trial and conviction in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is needed and Republicans hold 53 of the 100 seats. But a House vote to impeach a sitting defence secretary would be a historic rebuke in its own right, and it would put every member of Congress on the record about a war that has divided the Republican Party and, according to the president himself, cost it the midterm elections.

The filing on the House floor

Massie, an anti-war Republican and one of Mr Trump’s most persistent critics inside the party, first filed the same eight articles on 15 September. The House went into recess the next day after Speaker Mike Johnson sent lawmakers home early, and the notice expired without a vote. Massie promised to revive the effort as soon as Congress returned, and he did so within hours of the lame-duck session opening.

According to Reuters, congressional sources say the resolution may have the simple majority needed to pass the Republican-controlled House before Democrats take over on 3 January. The Reuters report and Fox News both note that some House Republicans have privately warned that the measure could pass. The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, told reporters: “I think there are enough Republicans who want him gone.”

Massie himself was more cautious. He told reporters that he did not know whether the resolution had enough votes to pass, and he warned that Mr Johnson could try to avoid a direct vote on the articles themselves. House Republican leaders have three options under the rules: allow a straight vote on the articles, offer a motion to table them — a procedural vote that would kill the effort without a direct ballot on the charges — or refer the resolution to a committee. Each of those is a recorded vote, so every member would be on the record either way.

Mr Johnson has opposed the effort. He has warned that impeaching the defence secretary “in the middle of hostilities abroad” would be “a terrible thing for our allies and our enemies to see.” Mr Trump has defended Hegseth in similar terms, telling reporters on 8 November: “He’s guilty of two things: basically winning two wars. I believe we saved the Middle East and Israel combined.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become the next speaker when the new Congress is seated in January, has already announced his support. He told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that he was a “hard yes” on impeaching Hegseth, whom he described as “a failure and a disaster for the American people.” He added: “The fact that Pete Hegseth is still around makes zero sense to a whole lot of people in this country. Hopefully this can come to an end.”

Massie’s fellow Kentuckian, Democratic Representative Morgan McGarvey, also reaffirmed his support on Monday. Mr McGarvey first called for Hegseth’s removal in December 2025 and has voted alongside Massie several times in support of war powers resolutions on the Iran war, according to the Courier-Journal.

The eight articles

The resolution accuses Hegseth of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, the constitutional standard for impeachment. The first article charges that he waged the war against Iran without a declaration of war, without statutory authorisation, and without an attack on the United States or an imminent threat — a violation, in Massie’s telling, of three separate provisions of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, the law that requires the president to seek congressional approval before committing American forces to hostilities.

The remaining articles reach well beyond Iran. They charge Hegseth with failing to follow laws that require the military to minimise civilian casualties; with ordering extrajudicial killings in the lethal American strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea that the administration says were carrying drug traffickers; with waging an unlawful war in Yemen; with seizing the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro without authority in a military raid; and with suppressing the free speech of Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, through a Pentagon investigation opened in retaliation for the senator’s criticism.

Massie has been blunt about what the case is — and what it is not. “We’re not indicting him for being bad at his job,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “He was very effective at killing school children in Iran. He was very effective at extrajudicial killings.” He added: “There’s no argument in these impeachment articles that he’s ineffective. The argument here is that he’s broken laws and he’s violated the Constitution.”

The resolution also accuses Hegseth of abusing the power of his office more broadly. “Hegseth has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to civilians, the lawful conduct of United States military operations, the integrity and credibility of the United States Armed Forces, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office,” Massie wrote in the resolution, which he read aloud on the House floor.

The school strike at the centre of the case

One of the eight articles focuses on an American military strike on an Iranian primary school that killed at least 168 people, most of them children, at the start of the war. The strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school on 28 February, the first day of the conflict, according to USA Today. The Pentagon has yet to release the findings of an investigation into the attack.

The school strike has become the most emotive element of the impeachment case, and the one Massie has pressed most forcefully in public. It is also the charge that most directly connects Hegseth’s conduct of the war to the laws of armed conflict, which require commanders to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm and to distinguish at all times between military targets and civilians. Massie’s argument is that the strike was not an accident of war but part of a pattern of disregard for those rules — a pattern he says is also visible in the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where the administration has said it killed suspected traffickers without any judicial process.

The administration has not publicly explained the school strike in detail, and the Pentagon’s investigation remains unpublished more than eight months after the attack. That silence has become part of the case against Hegseth: critics in Congress say the failure to account for the deadliest single strike of the war’s opening days shows that the military’s own oversight mechanisms have broken down under his leadership.

Massie is not the only Republican raising the issue. His resolution has drawn support from lawmakers who backed the war powers resolutions that the House has passed several times this year in an attempt to restrain the conflict — a sign that unease about the war’s conduct extends beyond the small group of anti-war Republicans who have opposed it from the start.

The arithmetic: could it pass?

Impeachment requires only a simple majority of the House. With Democrats expected to vote as a bloc in favour, only a handful of Republican defections would be enough to carry the resolution — and the reporting from Capitol Hill suggests those votes may exist. Reuters, citing congressional sources, reported that the resolution “may have the simple majority needed to pass”. Fox News reported that House Republicans have privately warned the vote could go against Hegseth. USA Today reported that “some GOP lawmakers believe that the impeachment effort could pass”.

That is a remarkable position for a defence secretary of a Republican president to be in, and it reflects how far Hegseth’s standing has fallen among his own party’s lawmakers. His combative approach to the congressional armed services committees — bodies that have historically enjoyed a close, cooperative relationship with the Pentagon’s leader — has alienated both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, according to USA Today. His tenure has also been defined by a string of scandals, including his use of a commercial messaging app to discuss a military operation, his push to livestream an execution by firing squad, and his fixation on troops’ testosterone levels.

There are, however, reasons to doubt that the resolution will reach a straight vote at all. Mr Johnson has already shown, in September, that he is willing to use the speaker’s control of the schedule to protect Hegseth, when he sent the House home early rather than allow a vote. The motion to table — which would kill the articles on a procedural vote — is the most likely route for Republican leaders who want to shield the secretary without forcing their members to vote directly against impeachment. But that, too, is a recorded vote, and it would put Republicans on the record as having protected a defence secretary accused of unlawful killings, in the week after an election in which voters punished the party over the war.

Massie has also warned that delay is not costless for his own party. In a statement on Monday, he said impeachment would be “much gentler” than what awaits Hegseth once Democrats take control of Congress in January. “They will hold hearings and trials,” he said. “President Trump should replace Secretary Hegseth now while he can still get a replacement confirmed in the Senate.”

That argument has found an audience among Republicans who want Hegseth gone but do not want to be seen voting with Democrats. Some have urged the White House to fire him and install a new leader at the Pentagon before Democrats take control in January and, as USA Today put it, “likely grind most confirmations to a halt”. Democrats have promised to investigate Hegseth over issues including the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior military leaders, according to Reuters.

Hegseth defiant, Trump defends him

Hegseth has responded to the impeachment push with defiance. In a video address on 5 November, he called Massie a “disgruntled, defeated congressman” who had joined with Democrats to drop “sham articles of impeachment against yours truly”. He added: “Their policies don’t work, so their obsession with political theater, disguised as power, drives them to try to destroy their opponents. Didn’t work against President Trump and it won’t work with me. You can rest assured of that.”

On Monday, he told reporters he was “not worried” about whether he had enough Republican support to defeat the articles, and he announced the Tuesday news conference at which he will defend his tenure. He drew a comparison to Mr Trump, who was impeached twice by the House, saying: “It didn’t work against President Trump, and it won’t work with me.”

Massie said he hoped Hegseth would use the press conference to answer the substance of the eight articles. “I hope he addresses the eight articles and doesn’t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and call everybody fat and gay,” he said.

Mr Trump has stood by his defence secretary throughout. The White House’s social media account has recently posted messages praising Hegseth and his accomplishments at the Pentagon, and the president defended him at length in the 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Sunday. “They want to impeach him. Very unfair. We had two wars, we won both,” Mr Trump said, according to a CBS transcript of the interview. He was referring to the Iran war, which is at an impasse, and to Venezuela, where the American military deposed Mr Maduro in a surprise commando raid on his compound in Caracas in January.

The president’s defence of Hegseth is also a defence of his own record. The two men are closely linked in the public mind: Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Army veteran, was one of Mr Trump’s most loyal and most visible cabinet picks, confirmed in January 2025 only after Vice-President JD Vance broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate. He has styled himself as a “secretary of war”, part of an effort to rebrand a military he said was too weak and too “woke” when he took office. That rebranding, and the wars that have accompanied it, are now the subject of the impeachment case.

How the war became the issue

The impeachment case cannot be understood without the war that produced it. The conflict with Iran began on 28 February 2026, when the United States launched a large-scale military campaign against the Islamic Republic. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening days of the war, and the conflict has since spread across the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the wider region.

According to figures reported by the International Maritime Organization, 129 incidents involving commercial shipping had been recorded by 6 November, with 25 seafarers killed. Eleven ships were attacked in the week ending 6 November alone, and three of them sank. The United States imposed a naval blockade on Iranian oil exports in April, and the Pentagon says the blockade has prevented more than $25 billion of crude exports from leaving the country.

The war has also produced the episodes that fill Massie’s articles. American forces have carried out lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the administration says were carrying drugs, killing their crews without trial. The United States has struck targets in Yemen and, in January, seized Mr Maduro in a commando raid on Caracas. And the war’s opening day produced the school strike that is now one of the central charges against Hegseth.

At home, the war has become a political liability for the Republican Party. Mr Vance has publicly questioned the conflict, and both he and Mr Trump have attributed the party’s midterm losses to the war and the rise in fuel prices that followed it. Voter anger over the war helped Democrats win control of Congress in last week’s elections, according to Reuters, and it has intensified Republican divisions over a conflict that Hegseth has defended as “courageous and historic”.

Meanwhile, the diplomacy around the war is at a delicate point. Iran has submitted a nuclear proposal through Qatar and says its offer to restart peace talks within as few as two days is the most reasonable available. Mr Trump told CNN on Sunday that fresh strikes on Iran were “highly unlikely” if the talks made progress, while warning that three American aircraft carriers were “locked and loaded”. American, Russian and Ukrainian officials are due to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday for talks on ending the war in Ukraine — a separate conflict that has nonetheless become entangled with the Iran crisis, because the same administration is managing both.

The impeachment vote will therefore take place against a backdrop of live wars, live negotiations and a lame-duck Congress that has only five weeks left to fund the government, with federal funding due to expire on 11 December. The House is also expected to vote on Wednesday on the funding package that would end the 41-day government shutdown, after the Senate advanced it on Sunday by 60 votes to 40. Hegseth’s fate and the government’s funding will be decided in the same week, by the same chamber, in the same charged atmosphere.

The Kelly article and the free-speech charge

One of the eight articles takes up a very different subject from the war: the free-speech rights of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. Last year, Hegseth sought to prosecute Mr Kelly after the senator and five other Democrats in Congress with backgrounds in the military and intelligence urged American troops to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth accused them of sedition, something Mr Trump at the time said in a social media post was “punishable by DEATH!”, according to Reuters.

The episode alarmed lawmakers in both parties, because it suggested that the Pentagon was prepared to use criminal prosecution against a sitting senator for political speech. Massie’s article charges Hegseth with violating Mr Kelly’s free-speech rights and with using a Pentagon investigation to retaliate against him. It is the article that most directly concerns the relationship between the military and civilian authority — the question of whether the armed forces answer to the Constitution or to the political fortunes of the president who appointed their leader.

The charge also connects to a wider pattern of behaviour that Democrats say they intend to investigate in January: the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the removal of other senior military leaders, and the use of the Pentagon’s internal machinery against critics. For Massie, the Kelly article is evidence that the problem with Hegseth is not confined to the battlefield. “He has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to civilians, the lawful conduct of United States military operations, the integrity and credibility of the United States Armed Forces, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office,” the resolution says.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A Republican revolt, not a Democratic one

The most important fact about this impeachment effort is who is leading it. This is not a Democratic attack on a Republican administration. It is a revolt from inside the president’s own party, led by a congressman who has spent years as one of Mr Trump’s most persistent internal critics and who is leaving Congress in January after losing his primary in May to a Trump-backed challenger. Massie has nothing left to lose, and he is using his final weeks in office to force his colleagues to take a position they have spent months avoiding.

That matters because it changes the politics of the vote entirely. If Democrats were bringing the articles, Republicans could dismiss them as partisan. When a Republican brings them — and when the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee says he believes enough Republicans want Hegseth gone — the vote becomes a test of the party itself. Every Republican who votes to table the articles will have to explain why a defence secretary accused of unlawful killings deserves protection. Every Republican who votes to impeach will have to explain why he broke with his president. There is no cost-free vote, and that is precisely Massie’s design.

The war-powers question

Beneath the personalities lies a constitutional question that has haunted American foreign policy for half a century: who gets to decide when the United States goes to war? The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to seek congressional approval before committing forces to hostilities. In practice, presidents of both parties have stretched those limits, and Congress has usually acquiesced.

Massie’s first article is an attempt to draw a line. It charges that Hegseth waged the Iran war without a declaration of war, without statutory authorisation, and without an attack on the United States or an imminent threat. The House has already passed war powers resolutions on the Iran war several times this year, a sign that a significant number of lawmakers believe the legal basis for the conflict is inadequate. An impeachment vote would be the most forceful expression of that view ever attempted against a sitting defence secretary, and it would set a precedent that future administrations would have to reckon with — whatever the outcome this week.

The school strike and the law of war

The charge that will be hardest for Hegseth’s defenders to answer is the school strike. A primary school is not a military target, and the killing of at least 168 people, most of them children, demands an explanation that the Pentagon has not provided. The fact that the investigation’s findings remain unpublished more than eight months after the attack is, in itself, an indictment of the system Hegseth oversees.

Massie’s argument is that the strike was not an isolated tragedy but part of a pattern — the same pattern visible in the Caribbean boat strikes, where suspected traffickers were killed without any legal process, and in the failure to follow the laws that require the military to minimise civilian casualties. If that argument persuades even a handful of Republicans, the impeachment resolution will pass. And if it passes, the question of what happened at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school will move from the margins of the war debate to the centre of a Senate trial.

The lame-duck clock

The timing of this vote is not accidental. Massie filed on the first day of the lame-duck session, when the outgoing Congress has five weeks left and the incoming Democratic majority is already preparing its investigations. His message to his own party is explicit: impeach Hegseth now, gently, or face a Democratic-led process in January that will be far harsher. “They will hold hearings and trials,” he warned on Monday, urging Mr Trump to replace his defence secretary while a replacement can still be confirmed by a Republican Senate.

That warning also explains why some Republicans who have defended the war are privately open to removing its public face. Hegseth has become a liability not only because of what he is accused of doing, but because of what his continued presence costs the party: a strained relationship with Congress that, according to Reuters, threatens the administration’s push for a $1.5 trillion defence spending package, and a running reminder of a war that voters have already punished the party for. For those Republicans, impeachment is not a judgment on the war. It is a way of surviving it.

What happens after Wednesday

Whatever the House decides, the story does not end on Wednesday. If the resolution is tabled or referred to committee, Massie will have forced a recorded vote, and the Democrats who take power in January have already promised to investigate Hegseth themselves. If the House votes to impeach, Hegseth would become only the third cabinet secretary in American history to be impeached — after William Belknap, the secretary of war impeached in 1876 over a kickback scandal, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary impeached in 2024 — and only the second civilian leader of the military ever to face that charge. A Senate trial would then follow, and although conviction requires a two-thirds majority that looks out of reach while Republicans hold 53 seats, a trial would put the conduct of the war itself on trial in the most public forum available.

Either way, the vote will be remembered as the moment the Republican Party was forced to choose, in public, between its president’s defence secretary and the laws its own members say he broke. That choice, once made, cannot be unmade.

What to Watch Next

1. The vote itself, by Wednesday: Whether Speaker Johnson allows a straight vote on the eight articles, or tries to kill the resolution with a motion to table it or a referral to committee — and how many Republicans vote with the Democrats in either case.
2. Hegseth’s news conference on Tuesday: His first formal Pentagon briefing since May, at which Massie has challenged him to answer the substance of the eight articles rather than attack his critics.
3. The Republican count: Whether the private warnings that the resolution could pass turn into public defections, and whether any Republican leaders break openly with the White House before the vote.
4. The Senate: If the House impeaches, whether the Senate moves quickly to a trial — and whether any Republican senators signal that they would consider conviction, even though two-thirds is a high bar.
5. The Abu Dhabi talks: American, Russian and Ukrainian officials meet on Tuesday and Wednesday, while Iran’s offer to restart peace talks within two days is weighed in Washington. Any progress — or collapse — in those talks will shape the political context of the impeachment vote.
6. The funding deadline: The House is also expected to vote on Wednesday on the package to end the 41-day government shutdown, and federal funding expires on 11 December. A chaotic week in the House could complicate both votes.
7. The January reckoning: If Hegseth survives this week, the Democratic majority that takes power on 3 January has promised hearings and investigations into the war, the school strike, the boat strikes and the firing of senior military leaders.

Sources

• Reuters — “Hegseth faces expected US House impeachment vote this week”
• Reuters — “Hegseth plays down impeachment risks, says ready to defend his record”
• USA Today — “Republican moves to force Pete Hegseth impeachment vote this week”
• USA Today — “Hegseth to hold press briefing amid questions about Iran, impeachment”
• Courier-Journal — “Rep. Thomas Massie moves to force House vote on Hegseth impeachment”
• Fox News — “Hegseth impeachment vote looms as House Republicans privately warn it could pass”