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Today, outgoing Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky is preparing to force a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the House of Representatives today, and it may actually get enough support even from members of his own party to pass. Meanwhile, Hegseth has been accused by senior Pentagon officials of assembling secret files on officers due for promotion, and using them to remove women and people of color from the list. Donald Trump is now ordering his Department of Justice to investigate a Democratic senator after she called attention to his corruption. And Texas becoming a blue state after the midterms has now caused significant damage to Republicans’ various legal fights across the country.
Before we get to the news: a brief ask: the lame duck session is underway, and Congress is voting on everything from impeaching Pete Hegseth to funding the military in the midst of Trump’s war. Raw America’s reporters are on the ground right now, asking the hard questions of the people in power. The only way we can keep that important work going into next year is if our readers believe in independent journalism enough to step up and fund it.
Massie to Introduce Hegseth Impeachment Articles Today
Congressman Thomas Massie, who will be leaving Congress in January after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, is expected to officially file articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today, according to Politico. They’ll be different from the impeachment articles he filed before the midterms and Massie is aiming to force a House vote as soon as possible.
Massie’s resolution accuses Hegseth of waging war on Iran without obtaining approval from congress, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without having the legal authority to do so, and blowing up boats in the Caribbean without following the judicial process. The Founders wrote the impeachment process into the Constitution specifically to curb this kind of executive-level war-making.
After last Tuesday’s staggering midterm losses, Republicans are eager to find someone to blame, and Hegseth is at the top of the list. Dozens of Republicans who just lost reelection may also skip votes this week. One unnamed House Republican confided to Politico that with the expected absences, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if the resolution passed the chamber, assuming Trump doesn’t first fire Hegseth.
Committee chairmen French Hill and James Comer have notably not ruled out a yes vote. Outgoing Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska — a retired general — said he’s currently leaning against voting yes but will at least hear the pro-impeachment side’s argument. As of Sunday night, GOP leaders haven’t begun the whipping process to drum up opposition to the impeachment vote. The lame-duck Republican majority could still kill the resolution with a motion to table, but that would require enough Republicans to show up.
In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over President Richard Nixon’s veto, because it had watched one president after another push America into undeclared wars. They rightly knew that nobody could stop it other than Congress itself. Whether the impeachment vote passes or fails, it would be the first time in a generation that the House has even been asked to do such a job.
Tell Congress: Impeach Pete Hegseth!
Hegseth Created Files on Officers Due for Promotion to Assess Wokeness
Trump’s Pentagon chief is also facing explosive new allegations about how he’s been handling military promotions under his tenure. MS NOW reported Monday that his office routinely circumvented the merit-based process for promoting senior military officers and instead went by newly invented criteria that disproportionately targeted women and people of color already approved for promotion.
One anonymous senior Pentagon official, who MS NOW said had deep knowledge of flag and general officer selection, said the defense secretary’s office searched officers’ names for reported instances of them promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, printed the results, and kept them in paper-only files that those officers were never allowed to see. Instructions on the new promotion criteria were reportedly issued by phone, and never in writing. Two officers whose promotions were withheld confirmed the report and said they were never even given a chance to respond.
Some of the criteria that reportedly disqualified officers for promotions included things like allowing the commemoration of Pride Month, speaking at a Hispanic Heritage Month ceremony and encouraging sailors to get vaccinated for Covid-19. Keep in mind, these were highly qualified and experienced officers who’d led carrier strike groups, logged thousands of flight hours and served in multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to MS NOW’s source, nine of the 31 officers selected to be one-star generals had their promotions withheld, and every woman and minority save for one was removed from the promotion list. The one woman and every single person of color up for promotion to the two-star level were also removed from consideration. The source said this marked the most names withheld from promotion in the history of the Navy. And because they were denied promotion, most of those officers will be forced to retire within 18 months, resulting in a huge deficit of experience at the highest levels of the military.
Military defense attorney Cody Harnish, who is a former judge advocate in the Army, plainly described Hegseth’s promotion process as illegal. Under federal law, the only perso who can remove individuals’ names from a list of one-star and two-star officers is the president. The law also allows for officers facing a delay to be entitled to written notice and be given a chance to respond. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell maintained that Hegseth is acting within his legal authority but refused to answer questions about whether he broke the law.
Back in 1948, Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces. And since then, the U.S. military has been one of America’s great ladders of opportunity. The senior official warned it could take a decade or more to undo the damage that Hegseth caused.
Secret paper files, instructions that never get written down, and an accused who never gets to answer are the machinery of 1950s-era blacklists. This country spent decades writing due process into law so that machinery could never run inside the military again.
Trump Threatens Legal Action Against Senator Calling Out His Corruption
After losing control of both chambers of Congress, Trump is now lashing out at a sitting Democratic senator. On Saturday, he posted to his Truth Social page that Democrats threatening to impeach administration officials is a form of extortion, and that he was ordering his Justice Department to investigate. He singled out Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, claiming without evidence that she wants to imprison Republican voters.
Slotkin countered that Trump’s answer to voters showing up in droves to reject his corruption was to promote outed white nationalist Stephen Miller to chief of staff and then have Miller write a post threatening to put her behind bars. Slotkin maintained that anyone who breaks the law or uses tax money to enrich themselves should face consequences, and anyone who isn’t shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
This isn’t Slotkin’s first brush with the Trump DOJ. Back in February, a grand jury declined to indict her after she and other Democratic members of Congress released a video urging troops to remember their duty to not obey illegal orders. Slotkin said Trump’s corruption and obsession with giving illegal orders tells Americans a lot more about him than her. She then suggested the president focus his time on ending the Iran war, rescinding his tariffs and tackling cuts to Americans’ healthcare that will go into effect in January.
The Speech or Debate Clause was written into Article I of the Constitution for this exact reason. The framers just watched the British Crown haul members of Parliament off to prison for things they said in the chamber in their capacity as elected leaders, and they sought to make it so no American president would ever have that level of power over the officials that the people elected to represent them.
Texas Flipping Blue Kneecaps GOP’s Legal Fights
Our final story this morning: the midterms did significant damage to one of the Republican Party’s most powerful legal tools when Texas elected Democrat Nathan Johnson as their next attorney general.
Johnson’s victory along with new Democratic attorneys general being elected in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, means thousands of government lawyers will now be acting under Democratic control. Texas led red states’ brief in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson case that ended up overturning Roe v. Wade. The office of the Texas AG has more than 750 attorneys. Former Virginia Solicitor General Michelle Kallen told Bloomberg that after Texas’ flip, red states’ legal coalition has been effectively beheaded.
Outgoing Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton built his playbook around filing federal suits in Texas judicial districts that were packed full of Trump appointees. And all appeals in those cases went to the far-right Fifth Circuit, which is full of both Trump and George W. Bush appointees. But after he’s sworn in to replace Paxton, Nathan Johnson is expected to toss that playbook out the window. This could mean moving cases to state courts where Democrats performed well in the midterms, and taking on the Trump administration in ways Texas never has before. And starting in 2027, no state touching the U.S./Mexico border will have a Republican attorney general.
Corporate lawyers are already urging clients to settle all pending cases before Democratic AGs take office in January. Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier hopes to fill the vacuum, but legal experts told Bloomberg it would take several more states to match what Texas’ AG’s office brought to the table.
In 1932, Supreme court Justice Louis Brandeis called the states the laboratories of democracy. For the past decade, the far right has used Texas’ laboratory to cook up lawsuits against everything from abortion rights to student debt relief. Now, that lab is under new management. The same federalist system that armed Ken Paxton is about to be pointed in the opposite direction.
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