Can American Government Become Boring Again? Or Why I Hope This Week's Attempt to Impeach Pete Hesgeth Is The Last Gasp of Pure Political Theater

 

In one of my first articles on politics back in the now halcyon days of 2023 I argued that the average American doesn't care that much about politics and government because it's immensely dull. I believe I used a line that if we did C-Span would be the most watched cable network.  I later argued the average person spends as much time on electoral politics as they can afford to and later statistical evidence about how relatively few people watch cable news networks like Fox News and MSNBC have born that out as well.

I'd add that by far the people who will decry how bad things are in politics the loudest are by and large the ones whose job it is to watch it – those in cable news, academics, entertainers and former elected officials. The average voter is basically indifferent to it in large because it doesn't interest them unless it directly effects them, which is why their first issue when it comes to voting has always been the economy. This is something that, for the record, those on the left care about the least – usually because they themselves are far better off than the  average voter.

More to the point for all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the idea that Congress is a circus or just engages in political theater, I'd argue those who say that are actually fine with it because when of what I stated in the first paragraph. I'd argue that's true for those who argue for social justice and other reforms. They say they want Congress to sign a bill enacted Medicare for All, but they're not going to stand by their TVs or their phones watching Congress hold hearings on the subject which is what it will take to actually get it done. And to be fair, it would very quickly become dull to watch because watching legislation being discussed is dull. That's how Congress is supposed to work; it's the C-SPAN version of it as opposed to ones we get on CNN or Fox News and even then they only cut in when it's getting combative.

And again that's how it should be. I think it's fine that Congress should be a long, dull process of working together to pass legislation that helps Americans. I also agree with the discussion that in the 21^st century far too much of it has been occupied by bad actors on both sides of the aisle (particularly in the House) who some of their own colleagues despise as being content creators rather than passing legislation. In a recent article for the Times Magazine many Congressional Democrats have decried how in the Trump era even the serious ones have been forced to engage in political theater for their base rather than the business of passing legislation. They've done so in large part in reaction to Trump and how the Republicans have reacted but also because of those in those in their own far left candidates who are more engaged in creating content then helping people.

I've written about some of the more overt versions, such as Jamaal Bowman's pulling a fire alarm in Congress in the midst of passing a funding bill back in 2024, but I've received numerous examples of this from the contest deluge of political fundraising ads I've received from progressive organizations over the year. Most of them involve support for reform bills that have no chance of passing in the current Congress (the No Kings Act, adding four new justices to the Supreme Court, repealing Citizens United) or more notably impeachment of either the President (both terms) or various cabinet officials. This brings me, as you might, expect to Pete Hegseth.

To be clear I'd been getting notices demanding since impeachment since November of 2025, along with those for Todd Blanche and RFK Jr. Now I'll confess I don't particularly like any of these men (to put it mildly) and I do agree that all of them have abused their office. But I also have no taste for symbolic gestures and even Congressional Democrats knew it was symbolic.

Nor, for the record, was I particularly wild that so many Congressional Democrats were essentially taking a page out of the Republican playbook. In Biden's administration alone, multiple Congressional Republicans announced articles of impeachment against him as well as multiple members of his cabinet. Those were far more political theater then what the Democrats were doing where there was at some legitimacy to the charges here, but they were just as meaningless.

That being said there is a legitimate case for Hegseth to be investigated by the new Congress and I hope that both House Oversight and Judiciary do exactly that. The model that should be followed is what happened in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms – it was a long drawn out process but it was serious, with many hearings and multiple arguments that led to a successful vote, if not a conviction.  That is not what happened this past week.

To be clear the man who is now the left's hero is Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican Congressman who (to his enormous credit) has never been Trump's biggest fan, particularly after he was reelected. During Trump's period of political retribution in May he had Massie primaried in his district and Massie lost his seat. He's been a lame duck for most of this year, much like Thom Tillis, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy in the Senate. And nothing gives you immense political courage like knowing you don't have to face the voters any more.

This fall Massie began his most direct assault on the Trump administration when he made it clear he was going to announce articles of impeach against Pete Hegseth. There had been, to be clear, no more of a formal investigation against him then any of the ones that had been done against Biden's administration, it was an act of pure political theater. The three differences were: 1) Massie was a Republican, albeit a lame duck, 2) by this point the Iran War was already such a burden on the Republican Party that many believed (rightly) that they would lose reelection and 3) many of them in Congress were tired of Hegseth's antics in particularly.

So Mike Johnson adjourned Congress before the vote could even come to the floor. It almost certainly wouldn't have gotten through the House and even if it had gotten to the Senate there was no chance for conviction given the numbers in both cases, but Johnson didn't want this to be a campaign issue that Democrats could use against them. They didn't need to – there were already a bevy of issues to use across the board – but everyone on the ground knew things were already going to be bad and they didn't want it to get any worse.

Then the bloodbath of last week happened and the lame duck session of Congress went in. Now for the next two months the math was no different. What was different was whether Trump would stand by Hegseth or fire him. Many had speculated that, as with Donald Rumsfeld after the 2006 midterms, Hegseth might be an acknowledgement of the failures and serve as a sacrificial lamb. Trump's sacrificial lamb was Suzie Wiles, his chief of staff instead.

I think Massie's action of reading the eight articles of impeachment were not a profile in courage but his own act of political retribution for the man who'd caused him to lose his job. If the vote had gone along party lines – which for the record it basically did – it would have failed. It also only delayed the inevitable: the new Democratic Congress had already made it clear it was going to investigate the administration and they wanted Hesgeth's head on a pike. So I think all Massie wanted to do was engage in one last gasp for the spotlight before he left the stage.

And the media obliged him. The moment he started reading the articles on the House floor everybody on cable news immediately took it as if it were a serious action. None of them argued that there had been no investigations by the appropriate (and currently Republican controlled) committees. No one considered that it wasn't going to have enough votes to pass in the Senate. So when the motion to table it until the next session – by which point the Democrats would be in power and it would almost certainly pass if it could – the entire cable news stratosphere chose to read it the wrong way.

Now there's an argument that many of the lame duck representatives – including at least forty Republicans who lost their jobs – might have resented being used as political props in another defeated Republican's play to engage in political theater There's also an argument that they've been so used to jumping at whatever the President's tells them to do they do it, and their actions were muscle memory more than anything else. In either case Massie was likely reading articles  to humiliate his former colleagues as much as the President. And having endured a shellacking at the polls a week earlier, they might have considered this the final insult to injury.

The last paragraph is me playing devil's advocate because I don't understand why (at last count) 45 Republicans who lost their seat in the election in large part of Trump's unpopularity still feel that they owe this man anything now that they've lost their jobs. I do hope that the first thing all of them do when they enter retirement is spend more time finding out what happened to their spines.

With that said those who choose to blame the eleven Democratic representatives who missed the vote prove yet again that they only understand government as political theater and in the case of the left, wanting immediate results. There was no way this vote was going to lead to Hegseth being impeached in this session and certainly not being convicted. This vote wasn't even going to do that: it was going to table it to the next session. And the Democrats were already talking about doing this as the scope of the majority was made clear.

 Massie's decision to do read the articles out probably annoyed some of them as much as it did the lame duck session: he was stealing thunder from the Democrats as much as he was humiliated his former Republican colleagues. In that sense I really do think Massie has done kind of a disservice to the whole process as its made what should truly be a serious and well-thought out enterprise into a question of pure political theater. No one's talking about whether Hegseth should be impeached; many consider this a failure to do so. In a sense they've have taken what should be a serious process into the land of Lewis Carroll: sentence first, verdict afterwards.

Now I know the new Congress which is heavily Democratic will thoroughly investigate Hegseth and other members of the administration. These investigations will by necessity take a long time, involve a lot of witnesses and closed door processes, and with no doubt a few exceptions be as tedious and uninteresting as all political hearings are and frankly should be. Perhaps Hegseth will be impeached; I think it's more likely that a few months into 2027 he'll resign. I suspect what will happen will mostly unfold on C-SPAN which means most of America will never care as much.

And you know something? I am absolutely fine with that. After almost a decade where all three branches of government increasingly seem to leave me in a state of constant vertigo, where everybody engages in theatrics and where I've spent so much of the last couple of years watching network TV with the dread of an interruption that might signal something horrible, I think I speak for countless Americans that what I really want is for politics and government to be dull. I want grownups to be doing the work without engaging in viral moments. I want legislation being produced, not content. That's what I really want from the new Democratic Congress. Do your job so well that people like me don't notice when you're helping us.

And bring the final curtain down on political theater. That'll piss off almost everyone in media, mainstream or social. Given the last decade, I think that would be a Congressional Resolution that might actually get unanimous consent and bipartisan support.