House Shelves Hegseth Impeachment as Republicans Pick Jim Jordan

Read the episode (Narration script)

Greetings once again and welcome to Political Science. It's Wednesday, November 11th. Let's see what the hell's been going on.

Pete Hegseth will not be impeached by this Congress. On Tuesday the House voted 211 to 204 to send Thomas Massie's eight articles against the defense secretary to the Judiciary Committee, which is free to ignore them and almost certainly will. Massie was the only Republican to vote no. So a party that has spent a week blaming the Iran war for its midterm losses chose not to vote, up or down, on the man running it. Massie's summary of his colleagues: they "know what to do" but "just can't bring themselves to do it."

Hegseth, at his first Pentagon press conference in six months, called the articles "a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment" and said of the operations they describe, "I would do it again tomorrow." Massie leaves Congress in January and says he won't try again. Democrats take over then and would have to file their own articles. Their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said, "It's just the beginning."

The same day, House Republicans chose who will lead them in the minority: Jim Jordan of Ohio, who beat Steve Scalise 106 to 73 by secret ballot. Jordan co-founded the Freedom Caucus and built a career making life difficult for Republican speakers. He lost this same race in 2018 by more than a hundred votes. His pitch this time was that he is "battle-tested on the oversight front." Voters said the election was about prices and the war. House Republicans have picked the man they want standing between Democratic subpoenas and the White House.

The Agriculture Department has proposed a rule that, by its own estimate, would take food stamps away from 6.3 million people, close to one in five who get them. Right now, in 46 states, a household that receives any help funded by the federal welfare program, even job training or a child care voucher, automatically qualifies for SNAP. That lets states enroll families above the usual income or asset limits. Under the proposal, only families receiving cash welfare would qualify that way.

The department says the shortcut has drifted far from its purpose of cutting paperwork, and points to a Minnesota millionaire who collected benefits. It projects about 45 billion dollars in federal savings over five years. About 1.8 million children would lose automatic free school lunches. The department expects nearly all of them to qualify again, once their parents fill out the forms the shortcut was built to eliminate. The first Trump administration proposed the same thing in 2019 and never finished it. The public can comment until December 10th.

Since American forces removed Nicolás Maduro in January, Venezuela's oil money has flowed through an account the US Treasury set up at Citibank in New York. The New York Times reviewed a confidential report on that account, prepared by the accounting firm KPMG. Through September, 12.26 billion dollars came in. Nearly all of it went back out: 11.7 billion to Venezuelan banks, to be auctioned off as dollars and prop up the currency, and about 130 million for the country's foreign bills.

That fits the administration's description of itself as a custodian. It is a custodian with considerable say: Venezuela's central bank has to ask for its own export earnings, and officials at State and Treasury sign off on every transfer. The report doesn't show who ended up with the dollars. Democrats take over the committees that can ask in January.

House Oversight Republicans closed their fifteen-month Jeffrey Epstein investigation on Tuesday with a 137-page report, and its main target is the federal government. It says prosecutors could have stopped Epstein after 2005 and gave him a lenient deal instead. It says guards at the New York jail where he died in 2019 skipped at least twelve rounds, leaving him without proper supervision for nearly eight hours. And it faults the current Justice Department for releasing files that exposed survivors' personal information. The committee wants witnesses re-interviewed, including one of Epstein's assistants.

The report also says nothing it reviewed implicates President Trump, and calls Democrats' interest in him an "unfounded witch hunt." The Justice Department says the recommendations "have already been addressed." Robert Garcia, the Democrat who inherits the committee in January, notes that the investigation held "zero public hearings." He is promising some, with survivors.

In Abu Dhabi, the first day of talks among Russia, Ukraine and the United States ran about four hours. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it "constructive and quite substantive," then described the substance: American negotiators asked whether Ukraine would give up the Donbas in exchange for security guarantees. He said no, because Putin would come back for more later. The two sides are also weighing a swap of a thousand or fifteen hundred prisoners each. European governments wanted in. Russia's foreign minister suggested they "stay at the hotel." The second day, on energy and the Black Sea, is scheduled for today.

And in Alaska, Democrat Mary Peltola's lead over Senator Dan Sullivan grew to 4,250 votes after another 25,000 ballots were counted. She has 49 percent. If she passes 50, the ranked-choice round that was expected to help Sullivan never happens. The final count is November 18th. In Mississippi, the deadline to fix affidavit ballots passed with Democrat Scott Colom still ahead by roughly twenty-five hundred votes. Counties certify Friday.

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.