Jeffries backs Hegseth impeachment push ahead of House vote

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday he will vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, giving the most prominent Democratic endorsement yet to an effort that Republican Rep. Thomas Massie plans to force onto the House floor this week.

"I'm a hard yes," Jeffries, a New York Democrat who is expected to become House speaker in January, said on ABC's "This Week." He said Hegseth "has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran" and added that "Pete Hegseth has got to go." Jeffries said he had not personally counted votes within his own conference but predicted "incredibly strong support," with members set to discuss the resolution when they return to Washington on Tuesday.

A privileged motion returns

The vehicle is a resolution Massie, a Kentucky Republican who lost his primary in May and will leave Congress in January, first read aloud on the House floor on September 15. It lays out eight articles of impeachment, accusing Hegseth of waging war against Iran without congressional authorization, continuing hostilities after the House and Senate directed a withdrawal and after the 60-day clock in the War Powers Resolution of 1973 had run out, disregarding civilian-casualty protections, and ordering lethal strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels that Massie's office says killed at least 221 people. Separate articles accuse Hegseth of retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly over his public remarks to service members, directing the operation that captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and launching strikes in Yemen without authorization.

Because Massie filed the measure as privileged, House rules require leadership to act on it within two legislative days of its return. Speaker Mike Johnson avoided that deadline in September by sending the House home a day early for what he called ordinary floor business, calling Massie's maneuver "a stunt." Johnson has said Republican leaders intend to move to table the resolution — a procedural vote that would kill it without a substantive debate — once the House reconvenes, though that vote still requires every member to go on record.

Massie's measure is not the only impeachment resolution pending against Hegseth. House Democrats, led by Arizona Rep. Yassamin Ansari, introduced their own six-article impeachment resolution in April, alleging an unauthorized war against Iran, violations of the law of armed conflict, negligent handling of classified information through the Signal messaging app, obstruction of oversight, and politicization of the military, including policies affecting women, Black service members and LGBTQ+ personnel. That resolution has sat in the Judiciary Committee without a floor vote. Massie has described his own version as "much gentler" than the Democrats', focused narrowly on the Iran campaign rather than the broader personnel disputes in the Ansari resolution.

The math on the floor

Whether either measure can pass depends on arithmetic that looked different a week ago than it does after Tuesday's midterm elections, in which Democrats won control of both the House and Senate for the next Congress. Multiple Republican sources told CNN before the elections that they expected some version of the impeachment measure to pass in the current, lame-duck House, where the GOP holds a narrow majority and several members have privately blamed Hegseth for pushing President Trump into the Iran campaign without a stated exit strategy. No Republican leader has publicly committed to voting for impeachment, and most GOP lawmakers remain reluctant to break with Trump even after the party's midterm losses.

Trump has made clear he wants Hegseth to stay. Asked by ABC News' Jonathan Karl this past week whether he still backs his defense secretary, Trump said he has "every intention to keep him" and separately dismissed Massie as a "very bad guy." White House aides have told reporters that Trump wants Hegseth to fight the impeachment effort rather than resign, in part because confirming a successor through the current, Republican-controlled Senate would be considerably easier than doing so after Democrats take the majority in January.

Reaction from the Pentagon and the White House

Hegseth has not backed down. In a video posted to social media after Massie's September floor speech, he called the articles "sham articles of impeachment" brought by a "disgruntled, defeated congressman" and said the effort "didn't work against" Trump and "won't work with me." Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement after the September floor reading that Hegseth "has been a transformative leader for the Department of War," using the administration's preferred rebranding of the department, and dismissed the impeachment push.

Attorney General Todd Blanche added a new dimension to the dispute this weekend, telling CNN that the Justice Department "could" open investigations into Democratic lawmakers conducting oversight of the administration, a remark Jeffries' office cited as evidence that the administration views congressional scrutiny itself as a target. Jeffries, who said he has not spoken with Trump since Tuesday's elections, called the results a "tremendous repudiation of MAGA extremism" and criticized Trump's decision days earlier to replace chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller as "an irresponsible decision."

"The so-called secretary of defense has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran. Pete Hegseth has got to go." — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Nov. 8, 2026

Who is affected, and what comes next

An impeachment vote in the House would not by itself remove Hegseth; a conviction requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, where Republicans hold a majority until the new Congress is sworn in and where no GOP senator has signaled support for removal. The immediate stakes are therefore more political than legal: a floor vote this week would force every House Republican seeking re-election, or hoping to lead their conference under a Democratic majority starting in January, to go on record on the Iran war just days after an election in which Trump himself acknowledged the conflict had taken a political toll.

Service members and military families are also directly implicated in the underlying dispute. The articles cite the Pentagon's targeting policies in Iran and in strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, operations that have drawn separate scrutiny from human-rights groups and some lawmakers over civilian casualties and legal authority. Massie's resolution also names Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former Navy combat pilot, whom it accuses Hegseth of targeting for investigation after Kelly appeared in a video urging troops to refuse unlawful orders.

The next concrete step comes Tuesday, when the full House returns to Washington and, according to Massie, the privileged resolution's two-legislative-day clock begins running again. House Democrats plan to caucus that morning to decide whether to back Massie's narrower, eight-article version, press for a vote on Ansari's broader six-article measure, or do both. Republican leaders have signaled they will try to table whichever resolution reaches the floor first. Jeffries said Sunday he expects "incredibly strong" Democratic support regardless of which version comes up, which would leave the outcome resting on how many Republicans, newly chastened by Tuesday's results, are willing to vote with Democrats against a sitting defense secretary the president has publicly vowed to protect.