US Defense Secretary Hegseth faces expected impeachment vote this week

It sets up a potentially explosive vote in Congress just days after U.S. Republicans suffered a crushing midterm defeat. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is playing down the risks of an impeachment push against him, saying he's ready to defend his record at the Pentagon. It comes as renegade Republican lawmaker Thomas Massie says he's attempting to force a vote on articles of impeachment against Hegseth over the conflict in Iran, accusing him of abusing his position and illegally waging war without congressional authorization I want to point out here is a lot of people are saying, well, I think Peter Hegseth's effective. He's good at his job. And so I don't want to vote for these articles of impeachment. Well, the reality is we're not indicting him for being bad at his job. In fact, he was very effective at killing school children in Iran. He was very effective at extrajudicial killings. There's no argument in these impeachment articles that he's ineffective. The argument here is that he's broken laws and he's violated the Constitution. For more, let's bring in our Washington correspondent. Fraser Jackson is standing by for us. Fraser, Pete Hegseth is saying he's not concerned at all about this attempt to have him impeached. Donald Trump says he's standing by him. But really, how serious could this get for the US Defense Secretary? Well, it's serious in the sense that impeachment is something that's only been brought against two cabinet officials who've been successfully impeached in the past. So in that sense, it is serious. But in reality, it's not likely to go that much further, even if it does pass the House. But effectively, this is Thomas Massie, who's been threatening for some months now to bring in these articles of impeachment. against the Secretary of Defense and now he is making good on that threat. Indeed, many believe that Massey wanted to bring these articles before the midterm elections and House Speaker Mike Johnson kept the House closed so that they didn't have to have this vote because effectively what happens now is that Speaker Johnson has two days to bring this vote to the floor. Now the House has the option within that time to vote on it directly but also to to vote to refer this to the committee or also to set it aside as well. So there's no kind of cemented way in which this will continue. But of course, the Republicans are enjoying their razor-thin majority only until January when that will change with the new crop of Congress people coming in. And Massey today said... That if this did go through the House and went to the Senate, ultimately the Senate would have to pass this by a two-thirds majority to result in the removal of Pete Hegseth. And he warned that if this lingers around for the next few months, then when the Democrats take over the Senate control in January, then it could well pass then. So a threat coming from Massie as well, who by that point would not be in his seat anymore. But it is certainly not a good look for the administration, Despite the fact that Hegseth says he's going to... stay the course, and Donald Trump says he's going to stand by Pete Hegseth throughout this process. Yeah, and apart from pledging his support, Donald Trump also doubling down on his political threats against the Democrats. Just how rocky, Fraser, is the road ahead? Some of the party warning that rather than focusing on investigating the Trump administration, they should be focusing really here on policy. Yeah, that's a question that the Democrats are still kind of battling with. We've We've seen a lot of the new congresspeople who... Who got their wins in last week's election in kind of like an orientation session today in Congress that will be going on for a little while. But that question does lie ahead. Are they going to stay more in the kind of oversight capacity or will they go down the more retribution path as well? That's still very much up in the air. But this is a difficult thing to navigate for President Trump. He's kind of oscillated between saying that he will work with the Democrats and then that and then he won't in the immediate days after the election. He seemed in a more of a conciliatory mood, but he started to double down once again. And now on Monday, he said that he was questioning the integrity of the votes that took place last week, very much going back to type, as it were, and asking about whether the voting machines that were used in the election may have been faulty or tampered with, giving those kind of suggestions. Of course, the election was such a massive repudiation of this administration and its policies that it's taken the president and his White House in time to recalibrate their messaging, but the path ahead for them is looking difficult as that majority in the House and the Senate comes into effect in January and the president will have to learn how to work with the Democrats or try to veto everything that they're putting in front of him as he's promised to do already. Fraser, for now, thank you. That is Fraser Jackson, our correspondent in Washington.