Before lawmakers even began voting on his effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, was teeing up another uncomfortable vote for his party, this time a resolution directing President Trump to end the Iran war.
All year long, Mr. Massie, a libertarian who was ousted after feuding with Mr. Trump, has used arcane procedural maneuvers to exert extraordinary control over the House floor, clogging up the schedule with politically tricky votes for the G.O.P. against the wishes of its leaders.
Speaker Mike Johnson has sent the House home early twice this year to shield Republicans from voting on measures that Mr. Massie has raised, first on releasing files related to the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and again on the impeachment resolution.
With just a few weeks left on the legislative calendar before the G.O.P. loses control of Congress and Mr. Massie surrenders his seat, he shows no signs of stopping, promising more forced votes and inconvenient moments on the floor even after his impeachment drive failed to pick up a single Republican vote.
On Wednesday, Mr. Massie secured enough bipartisan support for his bid to force the House to vote on another law tied to the Epstein files, this one to compel the release of more files and allow for lawsuits to obtain withheld material.
“I’ll give them every chance I can for them to vote for sanity before I leave,” Mr. Massie, 55, said in an interview after the vote to block the Hegseth impeachment charges. “And if they pass on the sanity vote, then — I mean, they’re all going to be up for election in 2028.”
It is a fitting coda to Mr. Massie’s 14-year career in Congress. Known as “Mr. No” for much of his time on Capitol Hill, the Kentucky Republican has exulted in weaponizing the minutiae of congressional procedure to suit his libertarian agenda of shrinking government, slashing spending and disentangling the United States from foreign conflicts.
In 2015, he helped write the motion to oust Speaker John Boehner that ultimately sent the Ohio Republican into an early retirement, a screed framed on his office wall. In 2020, he single-handedly called the House back to cast an in-person vote on the $2 trillion coronavirus pandemic stimulus bill, a one-man revolt that sent lawmakers across the country scrambling back to the Capitol, earning him heaps of bipartisan scorn.
More recently, he has gleefully played the role of his party’s foil as Mr. Trump has commanded near-total loyalty from other Republicans. In addition to the Epstein files and the Hegseth impeachment, he forced a vote on whether to oust Mr. Johnson for allowing a Ukraine aid package to come to a vote.
He also refused to back Mr. Trump’s marquee tax and spending cuts legislation because he argued it added too much to the debt, and has repeatedly voted against the war in Iran. He backed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the 2024 G.O.P. presidential primary, even joining him on the campaign trail.
All of it has earned Mr. Massie invectives from the top of his party all the way down. Mr. Trump called him “a total loser.” Mr. Hegseth at a news conference on Tuesday dismissed the impeachment resolution as “a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment,” led by “one disgruntled guy.”
By the end of the day, Mr. Massie’s G.O.P. colleagues were piling on.
“Massie losing his primary doesn’t make policy disagreements impeachable offenses,” Representative William Timmons of South Carolina wrote on social media.
Mr. Massie met his defeat with equanimity.
“The Republican conference hit an iceberg on Nov. 3, and I felt like I was bringing them a life raft,” he said in the interview after the vote. “I felt like the most likely people to vote for this wouldn’t be the ones who lost their elections, but the ones who are looking toward 2028 and are trying to put some daylight between themselves and the president. And none of them decided to get on my life raft.”
Mr. Massie, almost shrugging, continued: “The whole town has lost it over Trump. It’s a form of Trump derangement syndrome, where they can’t break away from Trump. They can’t even cut a path that’s a little bit away from Trump.”
There is, famously, little love lost between the two men. Mr. Trump marshaled his power as the most influential force in Republican primaries to find and back a G.O.P. challenger to Mr. Massie, Ed Gallrein, who prevailed earlier this year in a race that became the most expensive primary in the country.
“I think because I’m the only one who has broken from this administration, it was easy to make an example of me,” he said.
But Mr. Massie’s electoral loss only appears to have emboldened the puckish congressman, an M.I.T.-trained engineer and self-styled homesteader who champions raw milk and has invented dozens of gadgets, including the tiny electronic badge he wears on his lapel that displays the national debt.
Having extensively studied the precedents that govern the House, he recently took advantage of a little-used rule that allows any member of Congress an hour of time on the floor to rebut a colleague’s denigrating remarks.
He invoked that rule in September, after a visibly annoyed Mr. Johnson dismissed his prediction that G.O.P. leaders would send the House home early to stymie progress on the second bill related to the Epstein files. Mr. Johnson called Mr. Massie’s comment “nonsensical” and made by someone “who is not participating as a full member of the Congress.”
The result was a broadside by Mr. Massie that spanned his legislative career, from his work to release the Epstein files to the national debt. He also lamented what he suggested was the dumbing-down of Congress, at one point stiffening his arms and making mechanical-sounding noises to mimic what he called “robot” congressmen reciting speeches written by aides or generated by artificial intelligence.
In the interview on Tuesday, he said he worried that once he was gone, no Republican would have the nerve or ability to employ the kinds of guerrilla tactics with House procedures that he had made his calling card. Mr. Massie has only been able to circumvent House leaders with the support of a handful of other Republicans who will also be leaving Congress next year.
“I would like to transfer this knowledge to somebody,” Mr. Massie said, “but I don’t know that people would do anything with it. They’re terrified.”
Instead, he predicted that Republicans would “stay in this suicide pact with Trump, and the Democrats, recognizing that, are going to force some crazy votes” on the president’s statements and actions.
Not long after the failed impeachment vote, it was Democrats who signaled they would follow Mr. Massie’s lead once he was gone. Representative-elect Richard Ojeda, Democrat of North Carolina, who flipped a Republican-held seat in one of the early upsets of last week’s midterm elections, approached Mr. Massie in a hallway in the Capitol to thank him.
Mr. Ojeda, using an expletive, told Mr. Massie: “We’ll finish this next session.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
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