A Republican Tried to Impeach Defense Secretary Hegseth. The House Went Home.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky filed impeachment articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, then lost the floor to an early recess.

Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, to campaign for the midterm elections. The early adjournment left a Republican resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth without a vote, PBS News reported in an Associated Press account of the afternoon.

Underneath the resolution is the war in Iran. The Congressional Budget Office has put its cost so far at more than $38 billion.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky filed the articles. Massie says Hegseth took the country into that war without a vote in Congress. He also says Hegseth directed military strikes on Caribbean boats the administration alleges were carrying drugs. The articles call those acts high crimes and misdemeanors.

They never reached a vote.

Massie filed the resolution as privileged. That status starts a two-day clock for the chamber to dispose of the question one way or the other. Recessing runs the clock out, and nobody has to cast a vote against impeaching a sitting Defense secretary.

The recess stranded a second Massie project the same way: the bipartisan push he's been running to pry loose more records from the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

Massie held the floor for about an hour, the outlet reported. He went after Johnson, the Republican majority, and what he described as a refusal to lower prices or hold the Trump administration to account. “We're calling off Congress? And we're in the majority?” he said.

He also mocked the renaming of the Defense Department as the Department of War, done without asking Congress. A post office can't be renamed that way, he noted.

Johnson called the impeachment push “a stunt.” He said Hegseth has done an extraordinary job at the department. The speaker has spent recent weeks calling this Congress among the most productive in decades, and says voters will remember it in November.

The calendar reads differently. By one tally in the PBS News account, the House cut 28 voting days this year and added four, a net loss of 24. That's roughly a quarter of the days it had scheduled.

Johnson has repeatedly cancelled voting days rather than manage his own conference, the outlet reported, particularly on measures that would have rebuked President Donald Trump.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries stood on the Capitol steps with other Democrats. He faulted Republicans for failing to bring grocery prices down or end wars in the Middle East after promising both. Democrats would do better with the majority, he said.

Massie won't be in the next Congress. He lost his primary after Trump financed a campaign to remove him. He told the chamber he'd known from the start that he'd stand apart from it.

Among the bills the House did clear before leaving: one naming the Tyrannosaurus rex the national fossil dinosaur and the American mastodon the national fossil mammal.

Source: pbs.org, retrieved September 17, 2026.