House Republicans on Tuesday successfully blocked an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his handling of the Iran war and other alleged “high crimes” against the nation, handing President Donald Trump and his embattled defense secretary a win.

“The Democrats’ attempt to impeach Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has miserably FAILED!” Trump posted to social media shortly after.

Largely along party lines, and with some members absent, the House voted 211-204 to send the resolution to impeach Hegseth brought by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., on Monday to a committee, effectively killing it.

Massie was the only Republican to join Democrats. Eleven Democrats were absent.

Hegseth, who reposted Trump’s remarks to his own social media, had earlier derided the effort as a “political spectacle” brought by a rogue Republican lawmaker over mere “policy disagreements,” and promised to “never back down.”

“In the 250 years of our American republic, no secretary of war or secretary of Defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday morning, during his first news briefing at the Pentagon in six months.

Trump had backed Hegseth, writing, “Pete Hegseth gets an ‘A’ PLUS, PLUS, PLUS for his defense against a disgruntled, angry, defeated, former Congressman, Thomas Massie, a TOTAL LOSER!”

Massie’s resolution largely focuses on the war in Iran, arguing that Hegseth launched it without necessary congressional authorization, among other things. It also accuses Hegseth of violating the law in military actions against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, in the U.S. capture of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in that country in January, and in missile strikes on alleged drug boats in international waters around the U.S.

In his post after the vote, Trump noted that Massie was the lone Republican to vote against Hegseth — and praised Hegseth’s leadership record in Iran and elsewhere.

“Again, Victories in Venezuela and Iran, the Best Recruitment Numbers in the History of the Military (Long waiting lists to get in!), and Spirit like rarely seen before, led to the EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot,” Trump wrote. “The Democrats continue to weaponize and abuse the United States of America. They must be stopped!”

In his last months in office after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in May, Massie has long been a thorn in the administration’s side, including as a sponsor of legislation that forced the Justice Department to release millions of pages of records related to the late disgraced financier and convicted sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

Massie spearheaded that effort, and another war powers resolution aimed at reining in the Iran conflict, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont — who this week joined other Democrats in rallying behind the Hegseth impeachment, in part by citing Democrats’ sweeping wins in last week’s midterm elections.

“Now the voters have spoken. They want us to end this war. That begins with impeaching Pete Hegseth and convicting him in the Senate,” Khanna said in a video posted Monday.

Massie said earlier Tuesday that he had “heard from several members they agree with some of the Articles of Impeachment but not all of them,” and that if the motion to kill his resolution by referring it back to committee failed, and the House proceeded with a vote on the articles themselves, he would “request a vote on each of the Articles separately.”

That was not to be. The vote sending the resolution to committee all but kills it — at least until the many Democrats elected last week take office next year.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and many other Democrats — including from California — had come out in favor of the impeachment measure in advance of Tuesday’s vote.

Rep. Dave Min, D-Irvine, who co-sponsored a previous attempt to impeach the Defense secretary, said Hegseth should not only be impeached but also “should be facing criminal investigations, potentially for murder.”

Min said that throughout the Democratic caucus and among some Republicans, there is “not just frustration but an outrage that Hegseth is so cavalierly breaking the law, so cavalierly putting troops in harm’s way, and so cavalierly ignoring or throwing contempt on our attempts to exert oversight over” the Department of Defense.

Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, said Hegseth deserves to be impeached for sending the nation into a war that was never approved by Congress and that the House repeatedly voted to end, for breaking the law by ordering the killing of two men who survived a U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, and for refusing to provide answers about a U.S. missile strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran.

The impeachment effort would have faced even steeper odds in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority would have needed to vote to convict Hegseth for him to be removed. Two Cabinet members have been impeached in U.S. history; none has been convicted.

California’s Democratic senators — Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff — have long called for Hegseth’s removal. Schiff said Tuesday he supports Hegseth’s removal from office for various reasons, including his handling of the Iran war, his authorizing deadly strikes on alleged drug boats, and his having “abused the power of his office to punish those who have been critical of his leadership, including one of my colleagues.”

Schiff was referring to Hegseth launching an investigation into Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., after Kelly joined other lawmakers in telling members of the military not to comply with illegal orders. Massie’s articles of impeachment include a charge related to that episode, accusing Hegseth of violating the 1st Amendment in an attempt to intimidate Kelly.

The impeachment effort was an early — and perhaps too early — attempt at a reckoning over the unpopular Iran war after blistering midterms in which voters moved sharply toward Democrats — delivering the party control of both the House and Senate next year. Much of that swing has been attributed to the Iran war and the related surge in gas prices and other costs.

Vice President JD Vance blamed the midterm losses entirely on the Iran war, and Hegseth has repeatedly been questioned about those remarks as he has tried to defend the war as necessary and his leadership of the military as responsible.

On Tuesday, Vance put his own weight behind Hegseth too, calling the question of whether the latter has committed impeachable crimes “absurd,” and saying the answer is “obviously not.”

“Congress has so many tools for registering its policy disagreements. Rather than use them, they’re going to try to impeach Pete Hegseth. They did the same to Donald Trump,” Vance said in a social media post — a reference to Trump being impeached twice during his first term in office.

Hegseth — who calls himself the “secretary of war” despite no move by Congress to change the name of the Defense Department he oversees — has driven a radical reshaping of top brass within the Pentagon and of Pentagon policy — inspired largely by his fierce opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, transgender troops and others he deems insufficiently masculine, aggressive or ideologically loyal to the president.

“We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department,” he said in a September speech. “Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals. Just warriors.”

Such language — including the slur for transgender people — and Hegseth’s related reshaping of leadership have been denounced by Democrats and former military leaders as beneath the leader of the U.S. military and unfair to women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

Pentagon officials have attempted to show a unified front against impeachment and in support of Hegseth, with many posting an image of Hegseth emblazoned with the words, “Stand. Fight. Defend the Republic.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also defended Hegseth, asserting that all of the actions he has been challenged on were at Trump’s direction. “Not only did Pete execute on a direct order from the commander in chief, who, in our Constitution, is empowered and trusted with the job of keeping Americans safe, but they did it quite effectively on all those fronts,” Rubio said.

After Tuesday’s vote, Jeffries said Democrats would discuss whether to pursue Hegseth’s impeachment anew once they’ve taken power next year.

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