First things first: Pete Hegseth is facing impeachment not because he committed “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” but because all the Democrats’ wives have a secret crush on him.

Oh, sure, Hegseth is the most visible face of the administration’s engagement in what can reasonably be called an unpopular war, but the real reason they want Hegseth’s scalp is that he represents most everything today’s Democrats are insecure about. Hegseth embodies youth, strength, vigor, intelligence, conviction, toughness, presence, patriotism, and honorable military service. Name a single DC Democrat who brings those attributes to the Georgetown cocktail scene.

The eight articles of impeachment were brought yesterday by outgoing Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, an odd DC duck who used to caucus with the Republicans but who has, over time, morphed from principled Libertarian to Trump-deranged sore loser, a guy whose schtick ultimately grew old among his rock-ribbed Kentucky constituents, who sent him packing during primary season.

As the Washington Examiner reports, “Most of the eight articles outline Hegseth’s actions on recent military operations in Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela without prior congressional authorization. They argue that the secretary’s usurping of Congress’s will, as outlined in the War Powers Resolution of 1973, amounts to high crimes and misdemeanors.”

There’s a kitchen-sinkiness to these articles, though, as evidenced by one that focuses on the lethal and highly effective boat strikes conducted against Central- and South American drug runners, and by another that focuses on Hegseth’s ostensible mistreatment of Scummy Six Seditionist Mark Kelly, the Democrat senator and former Navy pilot who defiled himself and his military branch by participating in Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin’s despicable “illegal orders” psy-op video aimed at our warriors and our intelligence services.

This bouillabaisse of charges also reveals some disingenuousness in Massie’s rationale for having brought the articles. “The best target is Pete Hegseth,” as he put it yesterday near the steps of the Capitol. “One of the things that I really want out of this is to litigate whether Congress has war powers or not. Like, this is, I’ve got Republican colleagues who know I’m right on this.”

Like, if he really just wanted to litigate the War Powers Act, he would’ve delivered a more focused series of articles rather than going all Groucho Marx on us.

I’ll say this about Massie, though: He’s persistent. Massie first introduced these articles of impeachment back in September, but they didn’t get a vote at the time. Now, having become the darling of the Democrats, he thinks the time is right to drop an impeachment stink bomb before skedaddling out of town.

The Democrats are deeply grateful to Massie for having drawn up the articles because it lets them present the impeachment as a bipartisan effort. But it’ll only be truly bipartisan if Republican get all weak and wobbly — which I wouldn’t put past too many of them right now. As for the Democrats, I suspect they’ll bring the whole Signal snafu into evidence against Hegseth, if only to bloody him up a bit more.

The House is expected to take up Massie’s impeachment vote this afternoon, but a defiant Hegseth wasn’t about to just sit back and watch. Instead, the war secretary, who is one of Donald Trump’s most compelling communicators, held his first Pentagon presser in more than six months. Said Hegseth:

What one disgruntled and defeated congressman is attempting is not oversight. And it’s not accountability. It’s a political spectacle. ... It’s a farce, and it’s a stunt. And everybody knows it. ... No secretary of war or secretary of defense has ever been impeached for carrying out lawful military operations. And in our case, successful ones. ...

None of these are high crimes or misdemeanors. They’re partisan policy disagreements from people who want to politicize our military. We will not apologize for putting American lives first. We will not apologize for stopping the flow of drugs that kill our citizens. We will not apologize for destroying the capabilities of a regime that chants, “Death to America.”

As Fox News’s Lucas Tomlinson noted, “Ahead of Veterans Day, Hegseth called the resolutions dishonorable to those serving in harm’s way and a message that their service was a crime.” Holding the White House to account for its overly optimistic prediction about the war, Tomlinson added, “The White House said at the beginning of the war it would last only four to six weeks, and it has now stretched for nearly nine months.”

Tomlinson asked the secretary if he agreed with Vice President JD Vance’s assessment that Iran was the reason for the Republicans’ drubbing on Election Day. Hegseth said he didn’t want to engage in any finger-pointing. Good for him. What the Democrats most want right now is for the Republicans to splinter into every-man-for-himself backbiting.

Still, as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy notes, there’s a good chance that one or more of these articles will be approved, if for no other reason than the Republicans’ razor-thin margins in the House. He writes, “In September, Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) adjourned the House early, in large part, to prevent Massie from forcing the Hegseth vote. And that was before last week’s midterm wipeout that has many Republicans enraged, including MAGA Republicans who blame the Iran war for the party’s demolition. Many of them see Hegseth, reportedly a strong war advocate, as the main culprit.”

McCarthy, though, also notes that the Framers put all executive power in the hands of a single individual, a president, so schlepping off responsibility to a subordinate is a dodge if that subordinate was simply carrying out the administration’s lawful policy.

We shall see.

“We’ve seen this show before,” Hegseth said. “They impeached President Trump over a perfect phone call. They impeached him again in his final weekend in office. Both times they failed. Both times he came back stronger. And the American people sent him back to the White House. Now they’re trying a third time, this time against a member of his cabinet. They will fail again.”