The House voted 211-204 on Tuesday to send Rep. Thomas Massie's impeachment resolution against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Judiciary Committee — a procedural maneuver that effectively kills the measure for now, two months after the Kentucky Republican first filed it as a privileged resolution demanding swift floor action.

Massie's eight-article resolution accused Hegseth of violating war-powers law and other statutes governing military operations through his handling of the strikes on Iran earlier this year, along with military actions in Yemen, Venezuela and the Caribbean. Rather than forcing a direct vote on those articles, House GOP leadership moved instead to refer the whole package to committee — a maneuver that lets leadership shelve it indefinitely rather than kill it outright with a vote to table.

Massie was the only Republican to break ranks, voting with Democrats against the referral. By his own account, he wasn't holding his breath.

"I WASN'T SURPRISED, BUT I WAS DISAPPOINTED."

he told reporters afterward, according to CBS News' live coverage of the floor fight.

A Vote GOP Leaders Never Doubted

Speaker Mike Johnson made no secret of the outcome beforehand, telling colleagues flatly that "we have the votes" and dismissing Massie's push as "a political gambit for attention." Hegseth, for his part, had called the impeachment effort a "political spectacle" before the vote even happened. Nearly a dozen Democrats skipped Tuesday night's vote entirely, and their absence — not GOP unity alone — is what let Republicans clear the 211-204 margin; the Democrats who did show up voted unanimously to try to keep the impeachment effort alive rather than see it buried in committee.

The referral effectively parks Hegseth's impeachment articles in the Judiciary Committee, which Republican leaders control and have no obligation to revisit. That matters now more than it might have a year ago: last week's midterms were, by multiple accounts, a rout for the GOP, and Democrats are on track for a considerably larger House majority when the new Congress is seated in January 2027 — the point at which a shelved resolution like this one could, in theory, get a fresh look from a friendlier committee roster.

'This Is Not the End of It'

House Minority Leader Hakeim Jeffries framed Tuesday's outcome as a delay, not a defeat, for Democrats still furious over Hegseth's role in this year's military escalations. "This is not the end of it," Jeffries said. "It's just the beginning." The White House did not immediately issue a formal statement on the vote, though Hegseth allies have dismissed the entire episode as a messaging exercise by a single libertarian-leaning Republican with little appetite among his own party's leadership for a real floor fight.

Massie's resolution was built around Hegseth's handling of U.S. strikes on Iran, plus military actions against targets in Yemen, Venezuela and the Caribbean — a sweeping set of grievances that never got the individual, article-by-article votes Massie had said he'd force if the measure advanced. For now, the fight over Hegseth's conduct moves out of the House chamber and into a committee room, where it is likely to stay for a long time.