On Tuesday evening, one week after midterm elections that delivered a massive popular repudiation of the Trump administration and its war against Iran, the Democratic Party saved War Secretary Pete Hegseth from impeachment.
The House voted 211-204 to refer to the Judiciary Committee a resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, killing the measure for the remainder of the lame duck session. Every Democrat who voted opposed the referral, but 11 Democrats did not vote. Had they all cast their ballots, the motion would have failed 215-211, and the House would have been compelled to vote on impeachment itself.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi left Washington hours before the vote to fly back to San Francisco to receive a “Lifetime Advocate for Veterans Award.” Four others blamed traffic. Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan offered no explanation at all. Nine days earlier, Stevens endorsed Trump-backed Republican candidate Mike Rogers for Senate, against the party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, in particular over the latter’s criticism of the Gaza genocide.
All claims that the missing 11 Democrats were the product of unfortunate traffic patterns or important “lifetime” awards are rubbish. Had the vote been for funding Ukraine, the members would have been raised from their death beds if necessary.
This was a political decision made in coordination with the White House and the first major political test since the midterms. Under the banner of “bipartisanship,” the Democrats chose not to inflict a political defeat on the administration over the war in Iran, in the midst of their discussions with the White House on Russia and the military budget.
The Republicans understood what they had been given. Trump hailed the outcome as an “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot” and declared that the impeachment had “miserably FAILED!” Hegseth, for his part, answered the impeachment effort at a press conference earlier in the day by calling it “sabotage” and implying those who backed it were traitors.
The calculation behind the vote was spelled out the following day in a Newsweek analysis headlined “The 11 Missing Democrats Saved Pete Hegseth—and the Party From Itself.” Its author, senior editor Shane Croucher, argued that Democrats “don’t need the chaos of impeachment to scrutinize Hegseth.” What “chaos” means here is anything that might encourage popular opposition to the war or disrupt the bipartisan operations of American imperialism.
