Johnson Sends Lawmakers Home Early for Final Midterm Sprint, Scuttling Attempt To Impeach Hegseth

Speaker Mike Johnson is once again sending the House home early for a recess, though this time, lawmakers won’t return until after this year’s midterm elections.Mr. Johnson’s decision to cancel the last round of votes on Thursday also means that articles of impeachment brought by a GOP congressman against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will not receive a vote. Since winning his first full term as speaker last January, Mr. Johnson has had a penchant for keeping lawmakers out of town in order to avoid difficult votes. He kept the House out of session for nearly two months last year during a government shutdown in order to tamp down bipartisan talks around healthcare spending and reforms to immigration enforcement agencies. The decision to keep his colleagues away from Washington also meant that the Epstein files bill to force the disclosure of all Justice Department records related to Jeffrey Epstein would not come up for a vote. On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson announced that votes the following day would be canceled. The House had been scheduled to be in session through the end of September, though after Congress passed a government funding bill earlier this summer, Mr. Johnson canceled that two-week work period as well. Speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson announced that the Thursday votes would be canceled, though he said the decision had nothing to do with Congressman Thomas Massie’s articles of impeachment against Mr. Hegseth. Mr. Massie, a Republican lawmaker from Kentucky, has consistently argued that the war with Iran violates both federal law and the Constitution. “It’s a publicity stunt by someone who wants attention,” Mr. Johnson said of Mr. Massie, who introduced the articles of impeachment on Tuesday without warning. “It will immediately be [killed], of course, but we probably won’t do that today. We’ll probably do it when we come back. But it’s a stunt. Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job.”“We’re in the middle of international conflicts right now, and we should not be playing games with national security,” Mr. Johnson told reporters. Mr. Massie went to the House floor on Tuesday to file his articles of impeachment against Mr. Hegseth without prior announcement. He did not warn House Republican leadership he would be doing so because he feared that Mr. Johnson would abruptly announce cancellation of the rest of this week’s votes. Mr. Massie’s articles of impeachment are considered “privileged,” meaning that the House must take a vote on the measure whether or not Mr. Johnson objects. The eight articles of impeachment go far beyond the war in Iran, which Mr. Massie has opposed from the start. Of the eight articles, three accuse Mr. Hegseth of illegally launching and sustaining the war with Iran, one accuses Mr. Hegseth of directing the military in a manner that resulted in more than 200 civilian deaths at a Tehran school, one accuses Mr. Hegseth of illegally kidnapping President Maduro of Venezuela, and another accuses Mr. Hegseth of illegally launching strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. Another article of impeachment accuses Mr. Hegseth of illegally striking alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The sixth article of impeachment, however, has nothing to do with Mr. Hegseth’s combat directives. Instead, Mr. Massie believes Mr. Hegseth has committed high crimes and misdemeanors by suppressing the free speech rights of Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat and retired Navy combat pilot. Last year, Mr. Kelly and other congressional Democrats put out a video reminding servicemembers that they have the right to refuse to carry out illegal orders. Mr. Hegseth promptly sought to dock Mr. Kelly’s retirement pay, and President Trump himself reposted a message on Truth Social calling for Mr. Kelly and other Democrats to be executed. “Using the powers of his office, Secretary Hegseth retaliated against and sought to intimidate United States Senator Mark Kelly for his statement through a scheme or course of conduct intended to interfere with Congress’ constitutional authority to oversee the Executive Branch,” Mr. Massie’s sixth article of impeachment states. Mr. Massie argues that Mr. Hegseth sought to “grossly expand Article II power at the expense of both the Legislative and Judicial Branches of government, and establish a precedent that would chill the protected speech of millions of retired United States service members and inflict irreparable harm upon their First Amendment freedoms.”

Johnson Sends Lawmakers Home Early for Final Midterm Sprint, Scuttling Attempt To Impeach Hegseth

Johnson Sends Lawmakers Home Early for Final Midterm Sprint, Scuttling Attempt To Impeach Hegseth

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