Vice President JD Vance has publicly defended Secretary of War Pete Hegseth against an impeachment effort launched by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), arguing that the push amounts to political theater rather than serious lawmaking.
Writing on X, Vance dismissed the premise outright. “Has Pete Hegseth committed impeachable crimes?” he wrote. “The question is absurd and the answer is: obviously not. Like so much of Congress, impeachment has become a ridiculous show that stands in for actual policymaking.”
The impeachment effort follows Hegseth’s defense of the conflict with Iran and the operation to extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Hegseth himself has called the proceedings a “political spectacle.”
Vance argued that Congress has legitimate tools available to register disagreement with administration policy but is choosing a shortcut instead. “Rather than use them, they’re going to try to impeach Pete Hegseth,” he wrote. “They did the same to Donald Trump. Legislation is hard. Impeachments are easy (and ultimately, inconsequential).”
He went further, suggesting the real motivation behind the effort has little to do with Iran at all. “The irony is that legislators are most angry at Pete on the issues where he’s most correct: repositioning forces away from Europe/Ukraine and reorganizing the general officer corps,” Vance wrote. “This isn’t about Iran, this is about the fact that Pete took on the bureaucracy at the Pentagon.”
Support for removing Hegseth is not confined to Massie. Rep.-elect Brad Lander (D-NY) has backed impeaching Hegseth along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FBI Director Kash Patel. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has also signaled he would vote for it.
“I’m a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution,” Jeffries said on ABC News. “The so-called secretary of defense has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran, which has skyrocketed prices on the American people and made the country less safe.”
The dispute underscores a broader divide in Congress over how to confront administration officials: through formal impeachment proceedings or through ordinary legislative oversight, which Vance insists is being bypassed in favor of symbolic action.
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