Speaker Mike Johnson has sent the entire House home one day early, effectively giving Republicans a pass on having to go on the record about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
House Republican leadership had planned to remain in session until Thursday, but Johnson announced the last votes will be taken on Wednesday night and that they can then leave Washington, D.C. The House will not reconvene until after the November election.
The timing, however, is raising eyebrows as Rep. Thomas Massie had introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth on Tuesday. He filed them as a privileged resolution, meaning that they had to be voted upon on the House floor within two days — which should have been Thursday.
Even if he could not have garnered enough GOP support to oust Hegseth, Republicans would have been forced to go on the record about their support for Hegseth amid the Iran war just weeks ahead of the midterm elections.
Now, it appears, Johnson has saved them from that ahead of the November election, which is already expected to be a catastrophe for Republicans at the ballot box.
Massie said he specifically did not tell Republican leadership ahead of time about his decision to introduce the articles of impeachment to avoid exactly this scenario.
“I didn’t want to show it to anybody,” he said during an appearance on CNN. “I was afraid that they would do something to subvert me getting on the floor for an hour and 20 minutes and reading these articles.”
In a social media post reacting to Johnson canceling votes until November, Massie said it was the exact situation he had predicted.
“And there it is. Just as I predicted. They’re canceling Congress tomorrow to avoid the vote on IMPEACHING @SecWar,” he posted, adding, “It will also make it harder for us to reach 218 signatures on the Epstein Discharge Petition before the election. We were at 190+ signatures last night.”
Massie has been a problem member for Congressional Republicans throughout his second term, as he frequently does not vote for their legislative priorities. President Donald Trump was particularly irked with him over his advocacy to release the DOJ files related to the late sex pest Jeffrey Epstein.
The vote on Hegseth would have come as Trump’s war with Iran, now seven months in, continues to only get more and more disastrous. The cost of the war continues to balloon as the U.S. continues to deplete its stockpiles.
Just this week, new bombshell photos exposed just how much Iran has inflicted serious damage to buildings, aircraft and vehicles at U.S. positions in the Middle East.
The photos, leaked to CBS News by active-duty service members, show serious damage to a Boeing E-3 Sentry command and control plane destroyed after Iranian strikes at Prince Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia in March. That attack injured over 10 service members, two seriously, at the time.
“This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public,” one deployed service member told CBS News. “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
