Hegseth Faces Impeachment as Trump Calls Deportations Too Tough

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Greetings once again and welcome to Political Science. It's Monday, November 9th. Let's see what the hell's been going on.

The House may impeach a member of the president's Cabinet this week, and the push is coming from a Republican. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger and leaves Congress in January, plans to bring back eight articles against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. They accuse him of violating the War Powers Resolution in the Iran war, and of illegal military campaigns from Venezuela to the eastern Pacific.

On Sunday, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said for the first time that he's a "hard yes." "Pete Hegseth has got to go," he told ABC. Massie's resolution is privileged, which forces leaders to act within two legislative days. In September, they sent the House home early instead.

Republicans still hold a thin majority until January, but they've just lost both chambers, and many blame Hegseth for steering the president into a war with no exit plan. Several Republican sources told CNN they expect impeachment to pass. Removal would take two-thirds of the Senate. The only Cabinet members ever impeached were Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, by a single vote, in 2024. Hegseth calls Massie "a disgruntled, defeated congressman." President Trump says he has confidence in him: "We've won two wars."

The Justice Department is hinting at how it might answer oversight. Asked on CNN whether lawmakers could be investigated, Attorney General Todd Blanche said, "There could be," depending on what they said, and told members of the incoming Oversight Committee, "I would be very worried." Its likely chairman, Robert Garcia, called that a threat.

President Trump now says his deportations may have gone too far. Asked on "60 Minutes" whether his policy was too tough, he said, "I think it might be too tough, yeah." He mentioned hotel maids and cleaners with good jobs being sent away, and floated a deal for people who've been here ten or fifteen years. Right now, anyone here illegally can be deported no matter how long they've stayed.

The interview was taped Friday. About an hour later, he named Stephen Miller, the architect of that deportation program, as his chief of staff. Miller starts today.

On Sunday morning, at least eight Iranians were loaded onto a deportation plane in Mesa, Arizona, headed for the country of Georgia, then Pakistan, then Iran, a country the United States is at war with. Their attorney says the flight was canceled without explanation. Homeland Security wouldn't discuss it, beyond saying it is carrying out "the largest deportation operation in history."

Federal prosecutors told a judge last month they'd considered naming The New York Times as a criminal co-conspirator. The case is against former FBI director James Comey, accused of leaking sensitive information for a 2016 Times article about a surveillance technique. The transcript of that sealed hearing became public this weekend. Treating a newspaper as a partner in crime for publishing what a source told it would put ordinary reporting on trial. Comey says the charge came too late and was filed improperly, and a judge is weighing whether to throw it out.

Russian and Ukrainian negotiators meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for talks brokered by the United States, and Russia spent the weekend hitting the power grid. Sunday's strikes cut electricity to more than six hundred thousand customers in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where hospitals switched to generators, and about two hundred and fifty thousand more around Kharkiv. The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant lost its last outside power line and is cooling its reactors on diesel, its sixteenth full blackout this year.

There's also a new glimpse of Russia's own losses. Two hacker groups say they took records from Russia's state statistics agency showing at least three hundred and ninety-three thousand deaths tied to military operations through late August. Counting related cases, one group puts it at four hundred and fifty thousand. The files haven't been independently verified. Moscow's last official toll, in September 2022, was five thousand nine hundred and thirty-seven.

And Pope Leo arrived in Argentina on Sunday, the first papal visit there in nearly forty years, and opened with a polite critique of President Javier Milei: "The economy must serve the person, not the person the economy." Milei has built his presidency on deep spending cuts and calls social justice "a horror" and "theft." His ministers had predicted the pope wouldn't touch local politics. Milei, who posts dozens of times a day and calls his critics traitors, once described the late Pope Francis as the representative of evil on Earth. On Sunday, he called Francis "undoubtedly the most important Argentine in history."

That should do it for today. And remember, if you keep your expectations low, you'll never be disappointed. Thanks for listening, see you next time.