Days after Republicans lost widely across the country in the midterm elections, the House is considering whether to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is managing the Iran war that Republican leaders have blamed for their crushing losses.
The impeachment process is moving quickly. Hegseth could join just two Cabinet secretaries in American history to have been impeached by Congress, though his chances of actually getting kicked out of the job after a conviction in a Senate trial are much lower. Here’s what to know about the impeachment process and how it could play out with Hegseth.
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Impeachment is Congress’s strongest tool to hold the administration to account
The Constitution grants Congress the power to oust leaders of the administration, including the president.
Though the process mirrors legal proceedings in courts, with hearings and a trial, impeachment is a political process with political consequences. No one will go to jail for being impeached, but an official’s alleged wrongdoings can be debated, aired across the nation, and ultimately lead to their removal from office and prohibition from ever serving again.
“Impeachment proceedings serve the dual purpose of exposing and punishing abuse of power,” said Gregg Nunziata, who heads the Society for the Rule of Law, a conservative legal group.
How it works
Congress can decide at any time to start impeachment, for any reason. The Constitution is vague about what constitutes an impeachable defense, other than “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
The process starts in the House. In this case, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who lost his reelection contest, introduced articles of impeachment this week against Hegseth. The reasons he gives include continuing the war in Iran even though Congress has voted to stop the fighting; overseeing the killings of alleged drug traffickers in Latin America; and trying to punish Democratic members of Congress for addressing troops.
“They are comprehensive,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz said of the articles of impeachment Massie introduced. “Several of them are explicitly concerned with Congress’s power as an institution, so it’s not just accusing Hegseth of substantive wrongdoing, but also for undermining Congress’s role in government.”
When articles of impeachment are introduced, it can force a vote in the House within days. (In this case, by Wednesday evening).
The House can vote to table the impeachment resolution, or to debate it and ultimately pass it with a simple majority.
Approving the articles of impeachment against Hegseth is a possibility: The House is still controlled by Republicans until early January, but only narrowly, and it’s possible that a small number of Republicans join all Democrats to vote in favor of impeaching. In the lame-duck session, there probably also will be several lawmakers from both parties who miss the vote, which could affect the outcome. Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, declined to back the defense secretary, asserting that Republicans have “no idea what the strategy is moving forward in Iran.”
If a majority in the House were to vote in favor of the articles of impeachment, Hegseth would be impeached.
The next step would be the Senate, which would consider whether to remove Hegseth from office by holding a trial. The Senate can decide to dismiss the articles without a trial or hold a trial, as well as decide how it plans to go about that. This also takes a simple majority, which Republicans narrowly hold until January.
To actually convict Hegseth and remove him from office would be much harder. That would take a two-thirds majority, or 67 out of 100 senators. That’s a very high bar, and it rarely happens. Trump was impeached twice, including by a Republican-controlled Congress after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but he was never convicted and removed from office.
But it wouldn’t take a lot of Republicans to let a trial play out in the Senate, even if Hegseth is ultimately acquitted. That’s a possibility, with so many outgoing Republican senators and a clearly weakened Trump.
“With a smaller number of cooperative Republicans, you can turn this into a spectacle,” Chafetz said, “an effective opportunity for once again making the argument to the American public that the policies of the Trump administration are bad and hurting them.”
What else to know
If these articles of impeachment fail at any point, there’s nothing stopping the new, Democratic-led Congress from bringing them up again in January.
Trump could also just fire Hegseth rather than have his Iran war policy debated in Congress.
It’s also worth asking whether impeachment is utilized too often in modern times. Trump was impeached twice in his first term; it’s not off the table he could be impeached again by a heavily Democratic Congress. Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In 2024, Republicans in Congress impeached President Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, over border crossings.
The experts we spoke to pointed out that not every modern president has been impeached, indicating that Congress still saves it for extreme cases.
“The impeachment articles against Hegseth are extremely serious, and regular people are fired from their jobs for far less,” said Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.
“The tool has become all the more important at a time when presidential immunity and widespread abuse of the pardon power make criminal accountability for even grave lawbreaking elusive,” said Nunziata.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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