The Push to Impeach Pete Hegseth Is On

As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth becomes embroiled in a scandal involving military strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean, familiar refrains of Beltway discourse have begun to gain traction. Democrats in Congress, for example, are calling for moretransparency“and official”accountability” and swearing expand probes into murderous attacks.

Of course, there are many things to investigate regarding Hegseth, who apparently gave the second order to kill the two stranded survivors of the first strike and then sprung into action. lie about it. Yet, amid tedious congressional investigations and special investigations, Justice Department task forces, military investigations, and international litigation, the forcible removal of an armchair criminal from office almost guaranteed no result. That's why it's so infuriating that Democratic lawmakers have largely refused to use the most effective tool to ensure such accountability: the motion to impeach Hegseth.

It is difficult to imagine a case in which impeachment would be a more appropriate remedy. After all, if murder doesn't qualify as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” then what does? And an impeachment inquiry aimed at documenting criminal charges would be a hopeful first step in holding Hegseth truly meaningfully accountable for his behavior.

Of course, conventional Beltway wisdom is that impeachments are inherently political and therefore politically risky. And few Beltway operators are more traditional than House Democratic Leader Is Strongly Risk AverseHakeem Jeffries. So it wasn't a shock when Jeffries made a point exclusion of formal impeachment inquiry shortly after news of Hegseth's role in Second Impact first broke. Jeffries said planned investigations by the House and Senate Armed Services committees should result in “a meaningful investigation that we hope will be bipartisan,” while arguing that House Republican leaders were too partisan to allow any articles of impeachment to make it onto the legislative calendar.

Leaving aside the obvious contradictory nature of Jeffries's position, the mechanism of impeachment is actually not as unwieldy as he makes it out to be. Under Rule IX of the House of Representativesany member can move a motion to impeach a member of the executive branch with a privileged vote—meaning House leaders of neither major party do not have to approve it in advance. Once an impeachment resolution is introduced under Rule IX, the House has a two-day window to vote on it by a straight up-or-down vote—or, failing that, approve another resolution to repeal the impeachment resolution.

This is exactly the course of action Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar is now pursuing against Hegseth. On Tuesday, Thanedar announced that he had filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth.

Thanedar's petition cites both the second strike on September 2 and the recent damning Pentagon investigation into Hegseth's unauthorized sharing of details about the bombing of Yemen in an unsecured Signal group chat. “Here is a defense minister who is managing a trillion-dollar budget, putting people in danger, and he needs to act responsibly,” Thanedar told the publication. Nation. “The fact that he is revealing military plans in a Signal chat puts our service members in grave danger.”

Regarding the strike in the Caribbean, Thanedar added: “Actually, it is murder; it has nothing to do with drugs or protecting the United States,” also noting that President Donald Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted of smuggling approximately 450 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The first article of Thanedar's resolution accuses Hegseth of “murder and conspiracy to murder”, ignoring the more vague and euphemistic suggestions in most mainstream press reports that he may be guilty of “war crimes”. (An additional problem with this formulation is that there is no declared war or even similar euphemized “police action” that governs the U.S. rules of engagement in planned, barely rationalized attacks that are themselves illegal.) The article clarifies that in the September 2 attack, “pursuant to the orders of Peter B. Hegseth, the Armed Forces launched a second strike with the clear, premeditated and premeditated purpose of killing the castaways.” survivors of the first strike,” citing provisions of the Department of Defense Manual of Military Law, which prohibits actions that deprive survivors of mercy after an attack, not to mention actions that kill them immediately after the initial attack. The second article calls for Hegseth's impeachment and removal from office for disseminating plans for a Yemen strike in a Signal group chat last spring.

Given that leaders of both parties want nothing to do with it, Thanedar's resolution may not go very far after all. But there's a lot to be said for simply starting a serious discussion of Hegseth's impeachment on the Hill. To begin with, the impeachment resolution represents a come-to-Jesus moment for all members of Congress to take a clear stance on Hegseth's actions. For Democrats in particular, the Trump White House's continued references to criminal misdeeds and threats to democratic self-government begin to ring hollow in the absence of clear measures to punish the perpetrators. “That's why they look weak,” said a consultant familiar with Thanedar's resolutions, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly. “I've heard this before – it's kind of like the elite D.C. bubble saying, 'Oh, the last impeachments backfired or failed.' But that's not true—Democrats didn't actually pay anything for the ballot box” after their back-to-back attempts to impeach Trump in 2019 and 2021. “I don't think you can come out and say, 'They're criminals and [Trump’s] trying to be a dictator,” which is true and important, but without any evidence. And it doesn't mean they'll try to do so at a time when the polls are evenly split; he has a 20 percent disapproval gap.”

This is the main reason why, even before they were formally introduced, Thanedar's articles of impeachment received vocal support from members of the Democratic Party's activist base. “Pete Hegseth is an incredibly unqualified Christian nationalist lackey and alleged abuser who should never have been nominated in the first place,” said Hunter Dunn, a spokesman for the 50501 movement, which was instrumental in organizing the successful wave of No Kings protests across the country. “His support for Russian war crimes, the Gaza Genocide, his role in Signalgate, his attempts to censor the press and his general incompetence would all be reason enough to remove him. After he killed several sailors in the Caribbean, the only place he belongs is in a prison cell. So we are working on a number of different ways to get him removed, including having our members contact Congress and lobby for impeachment using our social networks.” platform to build public support for the investigation into Hegseth and his removal, as well as targeted demonstrations.” Thanedar, who previously tried to initiate Title IX impeachment proceedings against Trump until Democratic leaders persuaded him to withdraw it, is now seeking a better reception from the party's rank-and-file members, as well as some possible recruits from the increasingly fractious Republican majority in the House. “What we've seen from the vote on the Epstein files is that Republicans are now willing to question this president and willing to go against him on the right issue.” And at the very least, he added, the vote to impeach Hegseth should provide a document on which to continue to organize. “The question is not, 'What is politics?' or “What do the polls say?” It's more about, “Does this amount to a crime?” If so, then we need to do the right thing…. This forces members of Congress to take a stand. This is what we are chosen to do.”