I respectfully disagree with the Wall Street Journal‘s editors.
Reasonable minds can disagree over the wisdom of an impeachment effort against Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s defense secretary. As I said yesterday, while the effort is legitimate — the Constitution did not limit Congress to impeaching the president; the Framers made the remedy available against other executive and judicial officers — it undermines the purpose of the unitary executive, which is to make the president accountable for all executive misconduct. The Hegseth impeachment is proceeding on the irreconcilable premises that Hegseth, by duly implementing Trump’s use-of-force directives (rather than resigning, one supposes), is responsible for them, but that no action needs to be taken against the president who ordered Hegseth to use force in a manner alleged to be impeachable.
Moreover, the chance that Hegseth will be convicted and removed is low, so the exercise risks being seen as a political stunt that erodes the gravity of impeachment.
On the other hand, the charges against Hegseth are serious — even allowing that Congress is awfully late in defending its war powers, after decades of sitting idly while presidents used force without authorization and occasionally without any threat to vital American interests.
One can assess that the impeachment effort is not the best use of Congress’s time and yet conclude that Hegseth is guilty of at least some of the charges. (To repeat what I noted earlier today, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, so a lawmaker’s conclusion that the officer in question is guilty does not require a vote in favor of either impeachment in the House or conviction and removal in the Senate.) The Trump administration, including the Pentagon, would of course be better positioned to object to the invocation of Congress’s impeachment power against the defense secretary if it had not exploited executive law enforcement and military justice powers to engage in petty, partisan proceedings against the president’s political foes, including Senator Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), the proceedings against whom are the subject of one of the impeachment articles.
However one evaluates the effort, however, I don’t think the objections lodged by the estimable editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are persuasive.
In the editorial published yesterday evening, the House effort is portrayed as “the first post-election order of Democratic business” and “a feckless partisan gesture.” This is odd, because, as the Journal’s editors acknowledge, the impeachment articles were filed by a Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky — albeit a Republican who is a zealous critic of Trump. Under the current partisan makeup of the House, Democrats could not have impeached anyone. They’d need Republican help. Here, in fact, a Republican is the point man, and the gambit will still fail absent some Republican votes.
The Journal’s editorial also summarizes the case against Hegseth as if it involved only conduct related to the Iran war and the military campaign against Iran’s allies, the Houthis in Yemen. The editors are right that these are Trump’s policies and that an impeachment vote “will be another message to Iran that America lacks the political will to continue the fight.” But Americans were never asked whether they had the will to start the fight.
Even those of us who support military action against Iran, and believe that there was a strong case for taking it, must acknowledge that President Trump never made the case by going to Congress, seeking public support, clearly articulating the objectives, and grappling, before the shooting started, with the matter of how Iran would likely respond and whether we could sufficiently counter it. If Trump had tried to get public support, either he’d have not started the campaign upon its becoming obvious that the challenges were too steep — given his unwillingness to commit ground troops and the parlous state of our munitions — or he’d have gotten the public and Congress on board and thus have more support and options now.
More to the point, the Hegseth impeachment articles are not in fact limited to Trump’s uses of force against Iran and the Houthis. The editorial is silent on the articles related to the administration’s unauthorized use of force against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean (Trump’s policy, but one of which Hegseth has been a lurid cheerleader). It is also silent on Hegseth’s abuse of command authority and brazen attempt to intimidate Congress in pursuing Senator Kelly over an obnoxious but not illegal video (an unnecessary reminder to our well-trained forces that they are not required to obey illegal orders — likely with the Caribbean attacks in mind).
Perhaps this has something to do with the Journal’s editors’ implicit approval of the Caribbean strikes when they first started. But three months later, the editors — while still calling for “legal latitude” for the commander in chief — were lashing the administration for shooting the wounded in potential “violation of U.S. and international rules of war” (mind you, there was no war) and for stonewalling Congress regarding “the legal rationale for its drug-boat strikes.” (In federal law, drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war or an armed conflict. And by this time, the administration had conceded that its targets in the strikes were “non-state actors,” thereby nullifying earlier assumptions — including in the Journal’s initial editorial on the subject — that had tied the suspected drug boats to the Maduro regime in Venezuela.)
As for Hegseth’s jihad against Kelly, while the Journal’s first pertinent editorial was duly critical of Kelly’s poor judgment (and that of the other five Democrats involved in the video), it blasted Hegseth for abusively using his authority to punish Kelly, absurdly labeling Kelly’s conduct as “seditious,” and ignoring separation of powers (“As a sitting Senator, Mr. Kelly deserves particular leeway on political speech notwithstanding his continuing military status”).
Subsequently, the Journal’s editors scalded the defense secretary, “who takes tango lessons whenever Mr. Trump says dance.” The editors elaborated that Judge Richard Leon had rightly taken Hegseth to task for attempting an unprecedented extension of the limits on the speech of active-duty military members to retired veterans and even “a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military.” (It bears mention that this editorial said — not with any apparent disapproval — that Kelly had been pointedly critical of the Trump administration’s “bombing campaign against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.”) The editors cheered Leon’s conclusion that “Hegseth’s actions were a clear case of illegal ‘retaliation’ for speech he disliked” and that such intimidation threatened the very functioning of representative government. It was, the editors observed, a “legal humiliation” of the kind that was “becoming a habit for Trump officials.”
Indeed it was. I agree with the Journal’s editors that Hegseth’s behavior was egregious, and with what I infer is their position that egregious behavior is not necessarily worthy of impeachment proceedings. But when it is explicitly part of impeachment proceedings, it’s worthy of mention.