unpopular opinion, but i’m glad about this. the dems hate hegseth with passion, if he was almost impeached even in a republican congress, it’s practically guaranteed he will be impeached next time anyone tries. and why would the blue tsunami not try?

the real risk would be replacing him too quickly. senate can block his replacement, that’s gonna be a major point of leverage for the upcoming democrat congress. letting the gop rush his replacement would be a blunder, it would burn up all that leverage for nothing.

those no-shows are a genuinely good strategic move. they block the impeachment for now in a deniable way, because it’s gonna go through anyway, and because you can’t replace him if you don’t impeach him first. (unless trump fires him first, but like, fat chance.) however, an impeachment in february leaves trump begging the dems for his next secdef, while an impeachment now would have him scrambling to get a new guy in before the deadline.

i think the bigger problem with hegseth’s impeachment is he cannot be allowed to be replaced before january. after that, the democrats have a lot of leverage over who takes his place, because they can just say no to anyone trump presents, and acting secretaries of defence have significantly lower credibility than proper ones.

non-yank here, the one saving grace i see with the maga movement is that it’s a cult of personality, and political movements don’t tend to come back once they devolve into cults of personalities. like who’s gonna run it? jd vance, who doesn’t have the charisma to please a couch, let alone to run a country? hegseth, who is hated by his own party more than democrats hate a leftist? rubio, who sees maga more as a problem to solve and manoeuvre around than a movement that defines him? bannon and miller, who are so cartoonishly evil that they had to run things from the shadows even in a country that elected bloody trump?

i sincerely hope you do not have a good answer to this question. if you do, “never” is accurate. if you don’t, we might start trusting you again in like two admins or so. but we would definitely like to see some progress first, and while the blue wave in the midterms halts the decline, the hope for progress is pretty slim so far.

the thing about libertarian principles is that the vast majority of people who claim to believe in them only believe in them one way

they verifiably do, but introverts miss other introverts all the time