The House voted 211 to 204 last week to refer the resolution to the Judiciary Committee, effectively killing it until the new, Blue Congress moves in next year. All the Democrats voted for the impeachment resolution to go forward even though it is 99 and 44/100ths % garbage. What does that tell you about the integrity of this bunch? Not one Democrat has the guts to say, “Oh, come on. Who are we kidding?”

“This is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries,said following the vote. Oh, we know, we know. But that “affordability” thingy is going to be the top priority, right?

Massie, meanwhile, said after the vote that his next move would be to force a vote on a war powers resolution. “We’re going to see all these Republicans who said, ‘Oh, we lost this election because of the war,’ will they still vote for it?” Massie said. And there it is! This creep expects members of his party to place their political fortunes above the safety and security of U.S. citizens and Iran’s terror targets. ‘True, if we let Iran go ahead and develop nukes, Israel will be toast and maybe us too, but at least we may keep our jobs…‘

Still, the War Powers Act is the proper arena for Congress’s opponents of the Iran war to make their case, not by impeaching Hegseth as a Get trump voodoo doll. The President of the United States, not his Cabinet, is charged with obtaining consent from Congress for war. The Defense Secretaries under Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush II and Barack Obama were all impeachable under Massie’s fake theory. Jeffries’ theory is that Hegseth is one of the most incompetent and unqualified defense secretaries in history. Incompetence, though, is not a “high crime and misdemeanor,” and being unqualified would have made about half our Presidents impeachable, especially Barack Obama.

On The Volokh Conspiracy, libertarian law professor Illya Somin argues that Hegseth should be impeached. He holds Hegseth vicariously accountable for the President’s policy of preventing drug runners from killing Americans with their wares by blowing up their boats. There is no serious dispute over what those boats contained. Presidents have always had leave to stretch their powers in a crisis for the best interests of the public, as long as they are right. Trump was right. Moreover, Congress created a precedent when it allowed President Obama to drone American citizens abroad, a far worse breach of process. Somin, like the good libertarian he is, doesn’t approve of Presidential power generally and our current President specifically, as he proved with his contrived analysis in this episode. But I just love his self-indicting logic here:

“But don’t take my word for it, or even that of other libertarian or left-liberal experts…Take that of John Yoo, former Bush Administration official, and leading academic advocate of sweeping executive power over foreign policy and national security issues. If you illegally order the deliberate killing of civilians – especially outside the context of a war – that’s outright murder. And that’s exactly what Pete Hegseth has done.”

!!!!

John Yoo is the unethical lawyer who claimed waterboarding isn’t torture, and gave the Bush Administration a green light to “not-torture” suspected terrorists. He is totally untrustworthy, but Somin appeals to that authority because this time, Yoo’s analysis tracks with his own. Yoo has a rationalization named after him in the EA Rationalization’s list: “It isn’t what it is.” And Somin appeals to his authority. Brilliant.

My conspiracy theory friends—yes, I have some of them too—claim that the Democrats want to remove Hegseth by any means necessary to make a “color revolution” possible. Pete has done too good a job strengthening the military, you see. I don’t believe it, but trying to impeach a Executive Branch department head for following his President’s policies sure looks suspicious.