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Thomas Massie's Last Act in Congress Is Shaping Up To Be A Grudge Match.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a lame-duck congressman on his way out of the House, introduced eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on the House floor Tuesday. He read out the resolution for over an hour, pushing the day's business deep into the night, then filed it as a privileged measure — which under House rules forces a vote within two legislative days, meaning before Congress leaves for the midterm campaign.
He wants this on the record. In a Republican-controlled House, leadership will move to table it and it will die there. Nobody expects otherwise.
The eight articles charge Hegseth with waging an unauthorized war against Iran in violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution; defying H. Con. Res. 86, which both chambers passed in June directing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the conflict; conducting extrajudicial killings during Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean; retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly for a veterans' video by entering a formal censure into Kelly's military personnel file; seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid Massie calls an unlawful kidnapping of a foreign head of state; and launching unauthorized operations against Yemen.
Massie has been a fierce advocate of Congress' war-making authority for years. He and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced a bipartisan resolution in June 2025 to bar unauthorized hostilities against Iran. As he has argued repeatedly, Article I of the Constitution grants the war power to Congress, not the executive. On that constitutional point, he is not alone — civil libertarians and war-skeptical conservatives have made the same argument.
But the politics of this filing are impossible to ignore. Massie lost his primary in May to a Trump-backed challenger after Hegseth personally flew to Kentucky to campaign against him. He is a lame duck. This is the House's last week of session before the midterms. The timing is not an accident.
One small but telling detail: throughout the resolution, Massie refers to Hegseth as "Secretary of Defense (also referred to as Secretary of War by the administration)" — a signal that he regards the administration's branding of the role as part of what he is challenging.
The White House and Hegseth did not publicly respond to the filing. The administration has consistently maintained that the president's commander-in-chief authority covers the Iran operations, and that H. Con. Res. 86 has no binding force of law.
Impeachment of a Cabinet officer is extraordinarily rare. The House has impeached only two Cabinet secretaries in U.S. history — William Belknap in 1876 and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Even if Massie somehow carried the House, a Republican Senate would never convict. The real audience here is not Congress. It is the constituents Massie will no longer represent come January.
