House Shelves Massie's Hegseth Impeachment as Kentucky Delegation Splits 4-2

Rep. Thomas Massie’s bid to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will not get an up-or-down vote in this Congress. On Tuesday, Nov. 10, the House voted 211 to 204 to send the Kentucky Republican’s resolution to the House Judiciary Committee, a referral that leaves the measure parked with a Republican-led panel that is under no obligation to act on it before the session expires.

Kentucky’s own delegation split on the question. According to the official roll call posted by the Office of the Clerk, Reps. Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie and Hal Rogers voted to refer the articles. Massie voted no, joined by Louisville Democrat Morgan McGarvey.

How the vote broke

The clerk’s tally shows 210 Republicans and the chamber’s one independent backing the referral, while all 203 Democrats who voted opposed it. Massie was the only Republican on the losing side. Eighteen members did not vote.

Massie, who filed the eight articles again on Monday, described the motion in a social media post as a “procedural motion to kill the resolution.”

The articles accuse Hegseth of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Three of them involve alleged breaches of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 in the conflict with Iran. Others cite civilian deaths from a U.S. strike on an Iranian school, the lethal strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the operation that captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a bombing campaign in Yemen, and what the resolution calls retaliation against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.

Hegseth, Trump and the Pentagon respond

Hours before the vote, Hegseth held his first Pentagon news conference in six months and cast the effort as a personal grudge. “What one disgruntled and defeated congressman is attempting is not oversight, and it’s not accountability,” he said. “It’s a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment.”

He added: “I stand behind every one of these operations. I was proud to execute them, and I would do it again tomorrow.”

After the vote, President Donald Trump hailed the “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot” on Truth Social. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote that the referral “marks total victory for Secretary Hegseth, the Department of War, and the American warfighter.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become speaker in January, told PBS he was “a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution.” Not every Republican who has opposed the Iran war agreed. Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson, who has backed war powers measures, called impeachment “an effort to blame-shift on to Hegseth Congress’s failure and President Trump’s decision.”

Analysis: What it means for Kentucky

The Kentucky roll call is a snapshot of a delegation in transition. Massie lost his Republican primary after breaking with Trump and leaves the House in January, so Tuesday’s vote was likely his last major floor fight as Northern Kentucky’s congressman. Barr, who voted to shelve the articles, is headed to the U.S. Senate seat Mitch McConnell has held since 1985, and the Senate is where any future impeachment would be tried.

The referral does not close the door for good. Only two Cabinet secretaries have ever been impeached by the House, William Belknap in 1876 and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024, and neither was convicted. With Democrats taking the House majority in January and Jeffries on record in support, a new resolution would have to be filed from scratch in the next Congress. Whether Democrats pick up the case that a Kentucky Republican started is the thing to watch.

Editor’s note: The Kacee Allen Network News Desk confirmed the 211-204 result, the party breakdown and each Kentucky member’s vote directly against the official House Clerk roll call (Roll Call 317). Quotes and the description of the articles were checked against reporting from Breaking Defense, The Guardian and NPR. No interviews or phone calls were conducted for this story; the Kentucky roll-call breakdown and the analysis section are the Network’s own, drawn from those sourced facts.