House Republicans killed Rep. Thomas Massie's articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week, and the establishment press is calling it a Democratic fumble — but the real story is that both parties worked together to protect the military-industrial status quo from a rogue member who dared challenge it.
When a maverick Republican forced a vote on impeaching the Pentagon chief over an undeclared war in Iran, the system closed ranks. Republicans used a procedural gambit to bury the resolution 211-204. Democrats couldn't even be bothered to show up. Eleven Democrats missed the vote, some citing a traffic jam, while only seven Republicans were absent. The message from both sides to ordinary Americans: nobody with power will hold the war machine accountable.
Massie's articles targeted the core of the bipartisan war consensus. The first four addressed the Iran war, accusing Hegseth of trampling congressional war powers authority and failing to mitigate civilian harm — including the U.S. strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran. As The Guardian's Claire Finkelstein noted, these articles might have backfired precisely because presidents from both parties have flouted the War Powers Resolution for decades. Nixon in Cambodia. Clinton in Kosovo. Obama in Libya. Both parties own this record. Making war powers the centerpiece of impeachment would have forced every member of Congress to confront their own complicity.
USA TODAY framed the vote as a Democratic organizational failure, quoting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Everyone here should know better. There's just no circumstance in which these things should be occurring." Rep. Melanie Stansbury, who said she was delayed by a road incident, posted an apology video. Retiring Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was in San Francisco for a veterans event. One member was recovering from open-heart surgery. The press focused on the circus — who was stuck in traffic, who apologized — while burying what the vote was actually about.
The day after the impeachment failure, not a single Democrat objected to a GOP bill that critics say could hurt veterans with disabilities, allowing it to pass by voice vote. Two votes, two failures, same pattern: the opposition party that just rode a midterm wave into power can't find its footing when it actually matters.
But the deeper failure is bipartisan. Finkelstein argued that more targeted articles — focusing on "Signalgate," Hegseth's mishandling of classified communications on Signal that a Pentagon report says put troops in danger, or boat strikes against civilian vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that legal experts have condemned as murder — might garner bipartisan support. That a more politically viable impeachment would focus on process crimes rather than the unconstitutional war itself tells you everything about what Washington considers impeachable and what it considers business as usual.
Massie broke the unwritten rule: you don't impeach a defense secretary for waging war without Congress, because Congress gave up that fight a long time ago. Both parties killed his resolution — one side procedurally, the other by not showing up. The only question left is whether the new Congress, with roughly 260 Democratic seats, will try again — and whether they'll target the war itself or just the process failures around it.
