The Library Media — Opinion & Investigations · Editorial
Eleven Empty Chairs
By Catalina Clarke
Follow The Library Media
On Tuesday night the House of Representatives voted 211 to 204 to send eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense to the Judiciary Committee, where they will sleep for the rest of this Congress. The margin was seven votes.
Eleven Democrats did not vote at all.
Do the arithmetic the way their constituents will. Every Democrat who showed up voted no. Had eight of the eleven absentees been in their seats, the referral fails — and the House is forced to confront Pete Hegseth’s impeachment on the floor, one week after the voters handed the Democratic Party both chambers of Congress.
The articles were no stunt. They were brought by Thomas Massie, a Republican, accusing the Secretary of waging war on Iran without congressional approval and of ordering strikes on boats that legal scholars across the spectrum have called unlawful killings. Massie stood alone in his own party. He did not stand alone in the chamber: he stood with 203 Democrats. He needed eight more.
Where were the eight? The explanations, such as they are: traffic. A police escort for a bus. A reception hosted by Elect Democratic Women — a political action committee co-founded by Katherine Clark, who is, and we wish we were inventing this, the Democratic Whip: the officer whose entire job is knowing where her members are and getting them into the chamber. The former Speaker was at an event in San Francisco. One member arrived one minute late. One had a medical procedure and one a family emergency, and no honest person begrudges either — life happens. Which is precisely why a serious caucus runs a floor operation: so that life happening to two members does not become eleven empty chairs on the vote of the year.
And the leader? Hakeem Jeffries had told the country he was a “hard yes” on impeaching Hegseth, saying the Secretary had abused his power and engineered a reckless war of choice in Iran. A hard yes — that was never whipped. By the account of journalists covering his own caucus, members were left to vote their conscience, and eleven consciences were somewhere else. Asked afterward, the man who launched his bid for the Speakership on November 4 said: “I haven’t had a conversation with anyone on the floor team about what may or may not have happened in terms of the Hegseth resolution, but this is not the end of it. It’s just the beginning.”
It had better be a beginning, because Tuesday night was a leadership that speaks like a majority and counts like it has forgotten how it got one.
Massie himself has shrugged that Republicans had the votes to rally regardless. Perhaps they did. It changes nothing. You do not lose by seven with eleven of your own missing and call it fate; leadership is not excused by the possibility of losing anyway. A member who was present, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, said it on the night: there is “no reason why we should have lost this vote because of attendance issues.” The newest senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, put it in five words: show up and do your job.
January is coming, and with it a Democratic House that can take up Hegseth’s impeachment on its own terms. Nothing about Tuesday is irreversible except the lesson. On November 3, the voters did their part. They filled the seats. The least the people elected to them can do is be sitting in them when it counts.
Catalina Clarke — Editor-in-Chief, The Library Media
From The Library — the estate of our family.