Who Would a Democratic House Impeach?

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If Democrats win control of the House in November, they will face a dilemma: Should they attempt a record third impeachment of Donald Trump?

The president and his allies have warned that this would be a Democratic majority’s first move. “I’m going to be impeached. They’re going to impeach me,” Trump said last month at a rally in South Carolina. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been noncommittal. “We haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out in terms of impeachment,” the would-be speaker told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. But Representative Jamie Raskin, the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment, seemed more open. Earlier this month, on Meet the Press, he said that Trump had “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. “We understand it’s not a panacea. It is a tool in the toolbox,” he said. “We will not hesitate to use it if we need to use it.”

Realistically, House Democrats may have a hard time resisting impeachment. Their voters are in a punchy mood. A new CBS News / YouGov poll found that opposition to Trump is the top motivation for Democratic voters in the midterms, and the political consultant Sarah Longwell recently wrote in The Atlantic that the most important priority for Democratic voters is not left-versus-right ideology but a willingness to fight Trump tooth and nail. Jeffries has already faced criticism for being too passive a leader, as well as for meeting with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and he may struggle to ignore a groundswell of support for impeachment.

As a constitutional matter, the case for impeaching the president is solid. Trump has usurped congressional powers, started an unauthorized war or two, defied courts, and used his position for outrageous personal and family enrichment. In 2019, my colleague Yoni Appelbaum made the intellectual case for impeachment as a useful democratic process.

The political case for impeaching Trump is shakier. Regardless of the results in November, Democrats are unlikely to get enough votes in the Senate to convict and remove him, meaning that a third impeachment would hit the same dead end as the first two. An impeachment can still be effective as a way of damaging a president, but Trump is already deeply unpopular and will never face voters again, so the upside is limited, and an impeachment might give him a way to rally his remaining base around him—which would only strengthen his power and resolve.

But what if House Democrats impeached Trump’s Cabinet members instead? The power to impeach secretaries and other executive-branch officers is explicit in the Constitution but perhaps not well known, because it’s been used only twice in history. One reason such proceedings are rare is that a president usually fires a Cabinet member or forces them to resign before they can be impeached, but Trump has shown serious reluctance to fire aides because of public pressure. The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein has argued that if Trump won’t rein them in, Democrats should. On Tuesday, outgoing Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, brought new attention to the possibility by moving to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. GOP leadership promptly shut down all voting until after the election.

In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached for corruption, but he resigned the same day and the Senate subsequently acquitted him; a number of senators doubted they had jurisdiction post-resignation. (This historical example resurfaced during Trump’s second impeachment trial, which occurred after he’d left office.) In 2024, House Republicans impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on vague grounds, but the Senate voted to dismiss the charges as unconstitutional without a trial.

A Democratic House could plausibly launch impeachment inquiries into several administration officials, many of which would dovetail with investigations that representatives say they already have planned. In some cases, Democratic representatives have already filed articles of impeachment against Cabinet members, including Hegseth, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, but those have gone nowhere in the GOP-led chamber. A new Democratic majority could change that.

The conduct of a few particular individuals makes them likely targets for impeachment efforts. Kennedy has done serious damage to American public health, undermining vaccinations and weakening the CDC. At least one Republican senator has accused him of lying about vaccination rules during his confirmation hearings, when he also falsely characterized a trip he took to Samoa. Hegseth has waged an unauthorized war against Iran, for which he seems to have no realistic game plan; mishandled classified information; possibly violated the Hatch Act by appearing at a fundraiser for a political candidate; and left the armed forces bereft of leadership by firing a slew of qualified generals and admirals.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has been instrumental in turning the Justice Department into a partisan tool for persecuting Trump’s political adversaries, and a federal judge rebuked him for his role in Trump’s attempt to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for political allies. Multiple sources shared with my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick serious worries about FBI Director Kash Patel’s leadership, including claims of emotional volatility, heavy drinking, and absence from the job. (Patel denied the allegations and sued Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic for defamation, demanding $250 million.) Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has led a concerted effort to take congressional powers for the White House.

As a policy matter, impeachment of some of these officers could be more effective than ordinary investigations would be in halting the egregious actions taken by their offices and departments. It might also have a couple political benefits over impeaching Trump. First, such an effort could escape the Trump vortex: By moving the focus to officials who don’t command the same personal loyalty as Trump, impeachment might allow more emphasis on actual administration actions and policy, instead of on presidential personality. Second, conviction might still be a remote possibility, but GOP senators who are fed up with the White House might be more willing to vote to convict officers than they would be to risk taking on Trump himself.

The real question is whether controversial Cabinet secretaries will stick around to see whether Democrats try to target them. A midterm election, especially one that goes poorly for the president’s party, is typically a moment for some secretaries to exit. But Hegseth seems entrenched, continuing to push out rivals; Blanche just won confirmation; and Kennedy and Vought are ideologues pursuing treasured agendas. If neither they nor Trump are willing to change course, then a Congress that has done little for the past two years will have a chance to do something novel: act.

Related:

How does impeachment work? (From 2017)
How Trump broke—and then saved—impeachment (From 2021)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The White House withdrew President Trump’s nomination of Lance Schroyer to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his confirmation stalled in the Senate. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, had delayed scheduling a confirmation hearing while he sought more information from the Department of Homeland Security about investigations into the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis.
Trump was photographed reviewing a poster yesterday that appeared to say Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED, hours before his administration told a federal court that safety concerns required the building to close temporarily. The administration said the closure would last seven days and is separate from the legal dispute over the center’s future.
Yesterday, the House passed a bipartisan bill aimed at protecting consumers from paying higher energy costs tied to new data centers. The measure, approved 417–3, would require states to consider standards that make data centers cover the fund of grid upgrades needed to power their facilities.

Evening Read

A woman hugs a figure made of wires. — Illustration by Olga Aleksandrova

The Dead Silence of AI Therapy

By Steven Barrie-Anthony

Therapy can involve a lot of words, but it’s often the pauses that matter most. If you transcribed a session, the pauses would look like nothing: beats of silence, extra breaths, slowing down. But these can represent the crux of the practice: entry points into feeling. My job as a psychoanalyst is to listen as much to silence as to words, to be present with the patient while they’re quiet—to stay with them as they allow their feelings to emerge.

I was trained across diverse theories and techniques, but in my clinical work I have found that the cornerstone of the process is feeling. The patient’s emotional experience is the destination and the terrain. But I also feel; I am moved. And the work I do with my patients relies on our relationship and our capacity for mutual feeling. In many ways, the history of my field from Freud on has been a growing acknowledgement of the reality of this relationship—moving from the therapist as sealed off and standing apart, toward approaches that view the real human relationship between patient and therapist as the territory where healing happens.

Read the full article.