Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become the next speaker of the House, was interviewed on "This Week" following Democrats' historic victories in Tuesday's election.
Page A232From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 8 November 2026
Jeffries tiptoes around Hegseth impeachment, becomes a hard yes hours after Massie calls it the harsher plan.
As it ran on the front
I went to the wrong room again, which is most of how my columns get written. I wanted the Clerk's office, where resolutions get filed and stamped, and the guard at the Rayburn door sent me to the Rules Committee, and the woman at Rules sent me to the cloakroom, and the man in the cloakroom, eating a sandwich, sent me back to the Clerk's office, which had closed for lunch by then. Four rooms. Four blank looks. I didn't have a particular resolution in mind when I started out, not even this one, but I wrote down what each room told me along the way, because I can't always find the page again, but I remember what's written on it.
The sandwich man, it turns out, knew something. He told me Representative Massie filed his impeachment articles against the Secretary of Defense back in September — the fifteenth, he thought, and The Hill had it the same day, so I'll trust him. Eight articles. The Iran war, which Congress never voted to authorize, and a spree of boat strikes that human rights groups and international law scholars — not Massie, not me, them — call acts of murder.…
…(cont) My car needs a fan belt and has needed one since August, and every time I run it through the toll plaza on 95 I watch the two baskets — cash on one side, the transponder lane on the other — both headed to the same three miles of road. One knows exactly what it owes before it gets there. The other one is still digging through the console for exact change with the light red behind him. I think about that because on October 28th, The Hill had Leader Jeffries "tiptoeing" — denouncing the Secretary in what the paper called the sharpest terms, but not endorsing his removal. Sharpest terms. Not removal. That's the console basket.
Then Sunday — eleven days later, on television, on the record: "I'm a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution." Same Secretary. Same war. Same boats. I'm not saying what happened in those eleven days, I only have the two ends of them in my two hands, and I keep going back to the gap the way you go back to a glovebox you've already checked twice — sorry, I know I mentioned the rooms already, but there's a Tuesday sitting right in the middle of those eleven days, the one ABC said arrived with Democrats' historic victories. Was that the room the hard yes came out of? I wasn't in it. I was in the cloakroom.
Oh — excuse me, one more thing, before you go. Representative Massie told CNN on Thursday, three days before the Leader's hard yes, that his own resolution, the one sitting since September, is "a much gentler version" of whatever the Democrats end up filing. So the gentle one is the one that's actually written down. The hard yes, on Sunday, was for the one the Washington Examiner still called expected — not filed, expected — the harsher one, the one that doesn't exist on paper yet, not in any of my four rooms.
Which resolution was the hard yes actually a yes to — the one Massie wrote down in September, or the one that's still just expected, not filed yet, anywhere?
“Jeffries wasn't waiting on new facts — the Iran war and the boat strikes were in the papers back in September — he was waiting on Tuesday's results. Watch how fast "tiptoeing" turns into "hard yes" once the election hands Democrats the gavel. Nothing about Hegseth changed; what changed is who's now allowed to say it out loud and get credit for it.”
“Look, the Secretary's actions in Iran were a lawful response, full stop, and Democrats sat on their hands about it for two months because even they knew that — wait, did I just say they knew it was fine? That's not what I meant. The point is this is Massie, a Republican, stirring up his own party's administration, so whatever Jeffries does now is just him riding somebody else's bill to a headline.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
Massie says his Hegseth impeachment resolution 'much gentler' than what Democrats planRep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has sparred with his own party in the past year, said Thursday morning that his call to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “a much gentler version” of what could happen when Democrats take control of Congress.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) fully backed Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) expected impeachment resolution against War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday. “I’m a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution.
· Jeffries tiptoes around Hegseth impeachment from the morgue, 28 Oct 2026
· Massie Files Impeachment Articles Against Hegseth for Illegal Iran War, Boat Murders from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Massie launches effort to impeach Hegseth from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Thomas Massie touts poll showing slight majority support Hegseth impeachment from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.