He’d Do It Again Tomorrow

/ Jim
Photo: Chad McNeeley, via Wikimedia Commons [Public domain]

On Monday, a Republican congressman stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and read thirty-four pages of impeachment articles against the Secretary of War. On Tuesday, the House voted 211 to 204 to bury them in a committee — without debating a single article, and without voting on whether any of it is true.

The congressman is Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican, and an outgoing one — he lost his seat in the midterms and leaves in January. What he filed is not a press release. It is a resolution, H.Res. 1655, with eight articles: three charging that Pete Hegseth waged war on Iran in contravention of the War Powers Resolution; one for ignoring the laws meant to minimize civilian casualties; one for what it calls, in plain words, “extrajudicial killings” — the boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific; one for the capture of Venezuela’s president; one for an unlawful war in Yemen; and one for suppressing the free speech of a United States senator. Massie’s own summary is the fairest one I’ve heard: “We’re not indicting him for being bad at his job. The argument here is that he’s broken laws and he’s violated the Constitution.”

Before we go any further, let me clear away something Hegseth did not say, because the talk around this story keeps circling it. He never said he was just following orders. I looked. He said the opposite, and he said it proudly, at a Pentagon podium on Tuesday: “I stand behind every one of these operations, I was proud to execute them, and I would do it again tomorrow.” The impeachment itself, he said, is “a farce, and it’s a stunt.” “This is not patriotism. This is sabotage.”

Sit with that quote a moment, because the attitude in it is half of what this piece is about. There is a register that belongs to ordering other people’s children into operations where people die, and it is not pride. The register is reluctance: we did not want to do this; the circumstances forced our hands; we will answer for every bit of it. A secretary who boasts that he would do it all again tomorrow is telling you the killing was the easy part. I do not want a Secretary of War who finds any of this easy.

His legal defense, such as it is, is one word: lawful. “Every one was a lawful operation ordered by the Commander in Chief, then ordered by myself, notified to Congress, and executed by American warriors who did their jobs.” And he reached for precedent — no secretary, he said, has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations, “not under Reagan in Lebanon, not under Clinton in Kosovo, not under Obama in Iraq and Syria.” I would ask the Secretary to listen to his own argument. Other presidents did it and nobody stopped them is not a defense. It is the disease. Every undeclared war that goes unanswered becomes the next president’s permission slip, and that permission slip is what these articles were trying, however clumsily, to tear up.

But “lawful” is a claim, and claims get checked against the record — and this administration’s record with its own word is why a claim is all it is. In June of 2025, after the first strikes on Iran, the President announced that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Eight months later, on February 28 of this year, the same administration launched a full-scale war on Iran on the grounds that the same program was suddenly at the doorstep — Iran was, the President said as the bombs fell, “two weeks away” from a weapon. Obliterated in June. Two weeks away in February. Both cannot be true, and everybody in the rooms where the second war was decided — the Secretary of War very much included — knew the first claim had been made, because they had made it. A man asked to sell a story that contradicts his own administration’s story of eight months ago has an honorable option: he can decline to sell it.

February 28 is where I would put the pin in the map, because that is the day this president’s credibility with the voters died. The war was sold the way the nuclear claim was — as a matter of weeks, in and out. It has now run for months, with no end anyone can point to and nothing to show that the administration can describe the same way twice. This is a president who spent his first term boasting he was the first in decades to start no new wars. A year into his second term, he started one — in an election year, when somebody at the Pentagon who has read a map had to have been telling him what anybody could have: Iran is not a country that falls over in three weeks. It has not been conquered in the modern era, and it was not going to be conquered by a few airplane loads of bombs while its people rose up armed with pebbles from their backyards. A president focused on the American people would never have started it, knowing what it would do to the economy and the country. This one was focused on Iran, and the Reagan-sized promises he made to the people who elected him never appeared.

Now, about orders — because orders are in this story, just not where the television talk put them. The rule was written down in 1950, out of the ashes of Nuremberg, as Principle IV: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” A moral choice. For a cabinet secretary, that choice has a plain name: resigning. Nobody was going to stand Pete Hegseth against a wall if he decided the Iran war was unlawful and walked away. The worst of it was a lost job. And lest anyone think resignation is a theory, a man inside this very administration did it — the resolution quotes the March resignation letter of the National Counterterrorism Center’s director, Joe Kent: “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” He made the moral choice. The door was there the whole time. It still is.

Hegseth, to give the devil his due, didn’t hide behind that door. He owns the operations. What he cannot own is the other half of his Pentagon’s conduct — because while the Secretary was claiming every order was lawful, his department was punishing the one man who reminded the troops what the law says about orders that aren’t. Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, said in a video: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.” That sentence is, nearly word for word, the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual: “Members of the armed forces are bound to obey only lawful orders.” For saying it, Kelly got a Secretarial Letter of Censure this past January — the sentence itself listed among his offenses — and a proceeding to cut his retired rank. A federal judge, appointed by George W. Bush, had to block it as retaliation for protected speech. Hold those two facts side by side. The Secretary insists his orders were lawful. The senator who recited the troops’ duty in case they weren’t got censured for reciting it. Both cannot be the conduct of a department confident in its law.

At his press conference, Hegseth waved at Kelly without naming him — “Senators in cute videos have suggested the same” — and played his one orders card, aimed downward: “Put the secretary on trial today, and the men and women who carried out those orders tomorrow.” Notice what that line concedes. If the orders were lawful, no warrior has anything to fear — the law protects everyone in the chain. If they were not lawful, the chain is exactly where responsibility runs, and the man at the top does not get to use the men at the bottom as his shield. Either way, “lawful” is a claim, not a verdict — and a claim is supposed to be tested somewhere. A hearing, for instance. The House just voted not to have one.

Take the two biggest claims in the articles and hold them against the light, and you see why “trust us” is the whole of the defense. The boats first. The articles say the strikes killed at least 243 people in 69 attacks; Hegseth says 218, “narcoterrorists,” every one, as if the word settled the status of the dead. I am not going to tell you those boats were full of innocent fishermen, because I don’t know that. Neither am I going to take the administration’s word that every man killed on them was a cartel runner, because no evidence has ever been shown to the public — not names, not cargoes, not one boat’s proof. What has been shown is NPR’s Pentagon correspondent reporting that the Coast Guard estimates about a quarter of the boats it interdicts in that area have no drugs aboard at all. In this country, “take my word for it” is not evidence. It never used to be, anyway.

Then there is the school. On the first morning of the Iran war, two American Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, amid a compound of Revolutionary Guard buildings. The missiles did what precision weapons do — they went where they were sent. The problem was the sending: the Pentagon’s targeting database still listed the site as part of the Guard compound, although the building had been a school for about a decade — it had its own website, and it was labeled on Google Maps. The Minab prosecutor’s final count was 156 dead, 120 of them children. The first account out of this administration was that Iran had done it — the President said in March the strike was “done by Iran,” even after the wreckage of a Tomahawk, a missile Iran does not have, was on film. That story collapsed within days; by March 6, Reuters was reporting that U.S. officials believed American forces were likely responsible. By June the President’s version had softened to “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.” The Pentagon’s own investigation is finished, according to Bloomberg’s reporting — it blames flawed intelligence, outdated imagery, and overreliance on artificial intelligence — and the finished report sat unpublished through the midterm elections, on the advice, Bloomberg says, of the Secretary’s own advisers. The Pentagon disputes that a release date was set. What is not disputed is that the report is still not public. Remember that the fourth article charges Hegseth with dismantling the Pentagon’s systems for preventing, tracking, and investigating exactly this kind of civilian harm. A school full of children is what those systems existed to prevent. A secretary proud of the operation might start by publishing what his own investigators found.

Which brings me back to Tuesday’s vote, because accountability in this story failed in more than one lane. Massie stood alone — the only Republican willing to vote against burying his own resolution. The Democrats who voted were unanimous the other way, all 203 of them. But eleven Democrats never voted at all, in a vote that turned on seven. I have said for years that everybody in an administration should be held responsible in their own lane. Congress has a lane too, and part of it is elementary: show up. As for what happens next, the incoming Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, says, “This is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning.” On that, I will make a prediction of my own, and I do not make it lightly: he is right, and he is not imagining the half of it. This attempt to impeach a war secretary in the dying days of a Congress is only the beginning. Wait until January, when the new Congress is sworn in — then come the investigations, the subpoenas, the testimony under oath, for everybody, from the top of this administration all the way to the bottom. And count the resignations as the year runs. How many of these people will still be standing by next November is an open question, and I suspect the answer will surprise even the people asking it.

Here is where I land on the articles themselves: hold them accountable, all of them — every official in every agency who lent a hand, each in the lane where they lent it, from the very top to the very bottom. Everything done in these first two years is busy hardening into precedent, and precedent does not care which party set it. The next president, of either party, inherits every one of these permissions unless somebody takes them back.

But step back from the articles for a second, because in the end they are the smaller story — a highlight of the larger one. The larger story is a verdict the country has already delivered, and it wasn’t delivered in the House on Tuesday. It was delivered in the midterms, a week earlier, by voters who two years ago gave this president 77 million votes — and who this time, in numbers nobody can argue with, simply stayed home. That is what lost confidence looks like when it is counted. It wasn’t the Republicans who lost those elections; it was Donald Trump, because the country stopped believing him. And why wouldn’t it? Boats sunk on “take my word for it.” A nuclear program obliterated in June and two weeks from a bomb in February. A school full of children that Iran somehow bombed with an American missile, until it didn’t. A finished report nobody is allowed to read until the voting is over. A people can only be told so many stories that don’t survive the month before they stop listening altogether — and the Secretary of War, standing at his podium on Tuesday, proud of all of it, ready to do it all again tomorrow, is that style of government in its purest form. “I would do it again tomorrow” is not a defense recognized by the War Powers Resolution, by Nuremberg, or by any court I know of. It is not an answer to the articles. It is the reason for them. And if the midterms are any indication, the country has already ruled on the larger case — because what happened out there, almost overnight, is that support turned to anger. The articles failed on Tuesday. The country had already moved on to sentencing.

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