WASHINGTON — Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) hid his effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from his fellow Republicans until he unveiled it on the House floor Tuesday, fearing Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would gavel the House out of session to avoid taking up the measure.
“Frankly, I was concerned that Mike Johnson would end Congress again — like, shorten even our already truncated work period — if he found out I was doing this, so I shared the idea with nobody,” Massie told reporters on the Capitol steps.
“You can’t normalize kidnapping foreign heads of state. You can’t normalize taking over countries to take their oil. You can’t normalize bombing fishing boats. You know, these are extrajudicial killings,” Massie told Raw Story shortly after introducing his effort to impeach the Secretary of Defense. “It’s murder.”
“You can’t normalize murder, and so they’ve, in many of these cases, they’ve built a very shaky, convoluted legal scaffolding that they say protects them. And what I’m doing here is saying, ‘no, it does not,’” Massie continued.
Massie blames Hegseth and Trump’s White House for stretching the bounds of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which mandates that presidents come to Congress for permission to wage foreign wars if conflicts last more than 60 days. He said he’d been planning the impeachment move for two-to-three months.
By claiming an end to the Iran war ahead of the 60-day deadline, only to then ramp up bombing campaigns later, Massie says the administration is setting a dangerous precedent that cuts Congress out of the very War Powers Resolution Congress passed.
“They acknowledge it exists, and they have to comply with parts of it. Then they also acknowledge that the timeline requirements are real: a 60-day timeline. But they’ve invented this new legal framework where they say, well, we’ll end every conflict at 59 days and then restart it,” Massie said.
This summer, the Senate and House both passed war powers resolutions to block the president from engaging in war with Iran, yet the administration has rebuffed the bipartisan will of Congress.
“They are saying that the part about the concurrent resolution where if you have the House and the Senate pass a concurrent resolution, that that’s not constitutional, and so that they don’t have to follow it,” Massie complained.
“Well, they’re citing an immigration ruling by the Supreme Court that doesn’t even mention the 1973 War Powers Resolution. All of that needs to get litigated. There’s a law on the books that they are violating in several ways. And that’s part of what this is about.”
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, Massie says he plans to start rallying his fellow Republicans to get behind the effort.
“So I’ll go talk to them now and see what kind of support we can get,” Massie said. “But, you know, doing this wasn’t predicated on whether it could succeed or not. There needs to be a marker in history.
“They have exceeded all norms for rules of engagement, for how you use or misuse our military to take oil from another country, to kidnap a foreign leader. Like, somebody needs to put a marker in history, and that’s what this is.”
While Massie’s hoping to attract GOP support, he says he’s not holding his breath.
“I expect most of my Republican colleagues will vote against it,” Massie said. “They’re afraid of the White House too much.”
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