OPINION:
Trying to impeach Defense Secretary Peter Brian Hegseth would be an act of folly, but it could be the first stop on the Democrats’ planned revenge tour.
Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, filed articles of impeachment. Mr. Massie is an uber-isolationist who has a long-standing grudge against President Trump. He lost his bid for renomination over his isolationism and vehement opposition to Israel.
The articles of impeachment include accusations that Mr. Hegseth conducted military campaigns in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela in violation of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which critics argue is unconstitutionally restrictive of executive power.
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Yet the president, not the defense secretary, decided on these operations. Mr. Hegseth is not an independent agent in deciding against whom the United States will conduct military operations and how.
Still, Democrats seem to be determined to proceed with the farce. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat in line for speaker, said, “I’m a hard yes” on impeaching Mr. Hegseth.
Even if Democrats have the votes in the House next year to impeach the defense secretary, they will not have the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to remove him from office.
The nation will be forced to endure the spectacle of an impeachment that is destined to fail at a time when the United States is involved in sensitive military operations. The spectacle will only increase the intransigence of the Iranian regime.
Mr. Hegseth has no fans on the left.
The hostility began when Mr. Trump chose a warrior to run the Defense Department rather than another bureaucrat. As a member of the Minnesota Army National Guard, Mr. Hegseth was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and earned two Bronze Stars for his service.
In response to the secretary’s warrior ethos, recruitment has reached record levels. Mr. Hegseth ended the Biden administration’s obsession with race, sex and identity in the military. Mr. Hegseth has insisted on physical standards to make troops ready to fight while reducing waste in the defense budget.
When he was in Normandy this year for the commemoration of D-Day, Mr. Hegseth said Europe faces another invasion, this time of unchecked immigration, driven by policies that threaten to subjugate European sovereignty as surely as the Axis powers did in World War II. This did not endear him to the open-borders crowd.
The effort to impeach Mr. Hegseth is obviously aimed at Mr. Trump. After two failed impeachments of the president in 2019 and 2021, Democrats lack the stomach for another. So Mr. Hegseth is about to become their whipping boy.
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