Democrats Preview Their House Majority: Oust Hegseth First, Keep Trump Impeachment on the Table

Nine days before the midterms, two Democrats who prosecuted the first impeachment of President Trump went on Sunday television and told voters what a Democratic Congress would do first. Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, who runs House Democrats' battleground campaign, said removing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is his "priority number one if we retake the majority." Sen. Adam Schiff of California wouldn't say whether Trump has committed impeachable offenses, and he wouldn't take a third impeachment off the table either.

That's the pitch, in their own words. Not a price, not a bill. A target list.

Crow: Hegseth first

CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Crow, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, about what she described as a memo from Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warning that Iranian "lethal plotting efforts" against Americans had reached advanced stages. Crow didn't offer a word on the plot. He went straight at Hegseth: "Pete Hegseth remains incompetent and is not doing what's necessary to protect our service members, which is why he's my priority number one if we retake the majority, to make sure we oust him from the Pentagon" (CBS News transcript).

He named no specific failure. The answer then swung to Russia, with Crow saying Trump "lifted and eased sanctions to provide tens of billions of dollars to the Russian war machine to try to kill Americans."

Here's the catch. Congress can't fire a Cabinet secretary. Only the president can. What a House majority can do is impeach, with a simple majority vote. Removal takes a trial in the Senate and 67 votes, two-thirds of the chamber. In all of U.S. history, the House has impeached exactly two Cabinet secretaries, Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024, and the Senate removed neither. Belknap was found not guilty, and the Senate threw out the Mayorkas charges as unconstitutional, according to the Senate's own impeachment records.

Think of a fan promising to fire the head coach. He can boo all season. He can't sign the pink slip. Hegseth won confirmation in January 2025 on a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie. Crow's "priority number one" means a year of hearings, subpoenas and impeachment talk aimed at a man the Senate already confirmed and the president has kept.

Schiff: 'It will lead wherever it leads'

On NBC's Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker reminded Schiff that he led the first impeachment of Trump in 2019 and asked whether he believes Trump has committed impeachable offenses. His answer: "I feel the same way I did early in the Russia investigation which is: You don't prejudge the outcome before you even do the oversight." Democrats' oversight, he said, should go after what he calls corruption driving up costs, and "if that corruption leads in the direction of impeachment, it will lead wherever it leads" (NBC News transcript).

The Russia comparison is the tell. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report found the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government." In June 2023 the House formally censured Schiff over his public claims about that same investigation. That is the track record he's pointing to as his model.

Welker pressed him: fellow Democrats Sens. Brian Schatz and Tammy Duckworth have warned that impeaching Trump a third time would be a mistake. Schiff said he shares the concern about drifting from the cost of living, "but I also reserve the judgment to say, 'Hey, when we investigated this corruption, this is where it has led us.'" Then he named a first witness. On Elon Musk's Starlink service in Ukraine, Schiff said, "The Defense Secretary Hegseth should be brought in."

So two Democrats on two networks on the same Sunday morning landed on the same man.

The 'deterrence message'

Brennan also played Crow a clip of Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan at the University of Chicago saying she wants young people weighing a Trump administration job to think, "Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems," and adding, "I want that deterrence message sent." Brennan noted many conservatives heard that as a threat of persecution, if not prosecution.

Crow didn't back away. "She's a patriot," he said, and the point is that "we don't want people to want to go to work for a corrupt administration to try to line their pockets."

What it adds up to

Strip away the talking points and the Democratic agenda from this one Sunday is simple: go after the Secretary of War, keep impeachment loaded, and make young conservatives think twice about public service. Crow, to his credit, admitted the party has a problem. "We are also running against our own history to some degree," he said, adding that Democrats "lost 90% of U.S. counties in fall of 2024."

Voters get the final word on Nov. 3. The new Congress is sworn in in January. Nobody can say they weren't told what the first order of business would be.