Democrats push to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Digi Mart USA News: Asked on Sunday whether Democrats would try to impeach US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to force him out of the Pentagon, minority House leader Hakeem Jeffries said simply: “I’m a hard yes.”
“[He] has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran,” Jeffries said.
On Tuesday morning, Democrats reconvene in Washington for the first time since Republicans were routed in a blue-wave midterm election. The new members will not take their seats until January, but outgoing Republicans may avoid the lame-duck session.
One of those outgoing Republicans already has articles of impeachment filed against Hegseth and says he intends to pursue them this week unless Hegseth resigns, which so far he has shown no sign of doing.
In US history, only eight federal officials have been successfully impeached, convicted and removed from office, all of them judges. Donald Trump himself has been impeached twice and acquitted twice.
So what is Hegseth accused of, and what happens next?
Three sets of articles of impeachment have been brought against Hegseth. The first two, brought by Arizona Democrat Yassamin Ansari in April and Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar in September, were blocked by the Republican majority in Congress.
However, also in September, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, who will leave Congress at the end of the year after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, introduced articles of impeachment that may come to a vote this week.
The articles accuse Hegseth of acting “in a manner contrary to his trust as Secretary of Defense and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.” They further state that he “has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with his duties and the rule of law.”
Whether the charges are justified is almost beside the point, according to Lt. Gen.
Karen Gibson, a former director of intelligence at US Central Command, who notes that the House has “broad latitude” in deciding whether decisions or policies reach the high bar required for impeachment.
Impeachment is a two-step process steeped in politics. If the House adopts the articles by a simple majority, the official has been impeached.
This has happened more than 20 times, including twice to Trump and once to then-president Bill Clinton.
Even if defeated Republicans turn up to vote in the lame-duck session, there may be little incentive for them to vote in defense of the architect of a war that has proved so unpopular it ended their political careers.
However, almost all impeachments have failed at the second step: a trial in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict. No party has held a two-thirds Senate majority since the 1960s, so any overtly political impeachment trial is likely to fail.
Hegseth has not made himself popular on Capitol Hill, especially during combative Senate hearings in which members from both parties pressed for straight answers on military spending and strategy. Still, a two-thirds majority is widely viewed as unlikely.
Tim Phillips, a former Republican political operative, told the BBC that Hegseth would “absolutely” hold on. “It takes 67 votes out of 100 in the United States Senate to actually execute and finish an impeachment of removal from office [and] that’s not happening, period,” he said.
Retired Gen. William L.
Enyart, a former Democratic congressman and National Guard leader, is less certain. “There are more and more Republicans who are blaming Hegseth for the [midterms] loss,” he told the BBC.
“Both the vice president and even the president have admitted that the Iran war has caused a great deal of the discontent with the Republican Party.”
Enyart said Hegseth was “the most unqualified Secretary of Defence ever [and his tenure] has led to chaos… frankly I would like to see [him] resign immediately.”
Trump has stuck by Hegseth so far. On Sunday he reposted a video in which Hegseth called the “sham” articles of impeachment an “obsession with political theatre” that “won’t work with me.” In a 60 Minutes interview that night, Trump agreed that voters “didn’t like the war” but again insisted he still had confidence in Hegseth.
“They wanna impeach him – very unfair, we had two wars, we won both, we won Venezuela, we won Iran,” Trump said.
Also over the weekend, Iran announced it would lift its self-imposed 1,240-mile ballistic missile range limit and unleash new attacks on more distant targets. A spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard claimed Iran had new underground missile facilities designed to allow it to continue manufacturing weapons during wartime.
