Hegseth survives impeachment push as Democrats face balancing act

Well, let's talk more about today's impeachment push in the state of Congress today with my first guest tonight. He is our pal Andrew Donaldson, the editor-in-chief of Ordinary Times, up late with me live tonight here on The Final Five. Good evening, sir. Good to see you, my friend. How's things? We're hanging in there here. It's been a busy couple of days here. It seems like nothing's slowing down here in Washington. But here's the deal. Today, it sounded like Democrats and maybe even some political observers thought it was a fait accompli that Pete Hegseth was going to face the wrath of Congress. In the end, only one Republican sided on impeachment vote. And by the way, 11 Democrats didn't even show up to vote. If they did, we may have had an impeachment. Yeah, it's kind of weird, especially when we're talking about this super majority that they're getting ready to get in here in a couple of weeks. They couldn't get enough people there, and some of them said it was traffic. Go figure that, D.C. traffic of all things. But, yeah, there was a lot that went into this. There were some people who, on principle, thought the Mayorkas articles were really badly written and kind of haphazard, didn't like them on that. And remember, Mayorkas himself is very unpopular, even amongst his own party. So there was a lot of different things in this. But strategically, long term, I don't know that we actually gained any ground or Pete Hegseth should feel very safe. It's safe, considering that now, like a lot of people are saying, the Democrats are just going to come in, they're going to investigate this, and they may do it the right way, not the haphazard way that Macy's been trying to shove through. I want you to, I want to put yourself, or put you in the shoes of, as an Air Force veteran, somebody who's served our country before, you heard the argument from Pete Hegseth and others that if you would impeach the leader of the military. Well, I guess the president's officially the leader of the military, but when you punish the defense secretary, it sends a message to our enemies abroad. Is that accurate? Not really, because what the problem here is, is that this Department of Defense- Has been not well run, and I just mean on a practical level. Remember, Pete Hegseth has not been able to maintain a senior staff, a senior staff to run the largest department of the American government. It's just kind of shockingly bad. One of the reasons Congress people are so upset about this, and the senators as well, is they don't even know who in the building to talk to about things. Communication has broke down. On a practical level, before you get into any of the comments or any of the AI slop videos or any of the personal politics, or if you like him or don't like him personally, It's not really well functional, and then you put on top of it the unpopularity of the Iran war. You got the drone strikes in the Caribbean, which still need to be legally processed out and vetted. You've got a lot on top of a lot of things, but the department is just not working the way it needs to work. That falls on the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. There is likely going to be another impeachment effort once the Democrats take over. They're going to have the votes. No doubt they will have the votes going in. You mentioned that supermajority. We're looking at like 260 seats. There are still some races outstanding. But a lot of people have looked at the midterms and said, Democrats, the message wasn't about exacting revenge. It wasn't about punishment. It was about cost of living. It was about focusing on the issues that they believe the Republicans in Congress and the Republican president hadn't focused on. Do you think that there's a way to thread that needle going ahead? Yeah, and the way they are talking about threatening it is not going after President Trump himself, but they're going to go after these cabinet officials. They're going to go after Pete Hegseth, obviously, is the one, because we're already talking about him. They're going to look at the DOJ real good and hard. They're going to do investigations because their base demands it. And they have, let's be honest here, they have a ripe field of fire of potential targets to go and investigate, and that's the Trump administration's own fault for laying those out there. But yeah, when they get into power in January, if they don't deal with affordability, If they don't deal with the economy, if If they don't deal with corruption and all those sorts of things, they're going to be in trouble. Now, the corruption thing you can't investigate, but the economy, you can't investigate the economy back down. They're going to have to really balance this thing in order to keep this majority going into the next elections. Early on in the Republican leadership, I'm thinking back to Kevin McCarthy. There were people who were unhappy with his leadership, and we saw him deposed as House Speaker. In came Mike Johnson, but you also have progressives. On the Democratic side, once they get the majority, they want to see a lot of these hearings. They want to see this move ahead. And there seems to be, it's a thankless task when you're in leadership because you have to get everybody in line. But you know there's going to be people on the fringes, whether it be left or right, who are not going to be happy unless you check everything off their list that seems to be a priority. Sure. But one thing that actually helps them is having such a large majority actually kind of helps them out on that where you're not going to get in a situation like Mike Johnson, where he only had a majority in name only really when you only have a couple of seats. So you have a 30 member House Freedom Caucus throwing a wrench in everything. You have three or four members of Congress stopping absolutely everything. You've got a lot more wiggle room. Now, Hakeem Jeffries is an unproven leader. He's going to have to learn this stuff on the fly, although he's had a long period of preparation thing. And of course, we've already seen in the Senate, and you talked about in the lead-in, are you going to have Chuck Schumer be able to hold his caucus together in the Senate? I think he will. I think this is a lot of noise, and he will be the leader there. And Hakeem Jeffries will be the speaker. There's no denying that. But now they got to do the job. It's been time of them talking about being in leadership. Now they're going to have to show it. And they're going to have to show it in short order, because we know with these majorities coming in, you get a couple of months, and then it's right back to politics as usual and on to the next election, especially in Congress. Politics is huge. And I never imagined seeing that in Washington, but here we go. And we'll be watching all that as it plays out. Andrew, I'm out of time. Always appreciate you taking time and sticking around with us and especially putting a tie on for me this late when I, when I can't be bothered to do the same myself. Well, it's the closest I can do. Cause you're so much better looking to me. So I got at least dapper it up. Appreciate you, my friend. Flattery gets you everywhere. Andrew Donaldson for us tonight here on the final five. Good to see you, my man. We're back after this.