The hosts of Disney's daytime talk show The View spent Wednesday's episode unloading on their own party after eleven Democrats missed the vote that killed an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a procedural motion that failed 211 to 204 in the House on Tuesday.
The impeachment articles were introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who was the only Republican to vote against referring the matter to the House Judiciary Committee. The maneuver effectively ends the drive for the current Congress, whose term expires in roughly eight weeks. According to Al Jazeera, Democrats will take control of the House and Senate on January 3.
Had the eleven absent Democrats shown up and voted with their colleagues, they would have had the numbers to defeat the procedural move and force a full House vote on impeachment as early as this week, Al Jazeera reported. Instead, the absences — larger than the seven-vote final margin — proved decisive. Seven Republicans also missed the vote, according to Newsweek.
That math was not lost on the women of The View.
"This is the last time you get to do this because as quickly as we put you in power, we can remove you from power. Do not do this," co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, according to Breitbart's account of the segment.
Goldberg introduced a clip package of Massie, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) criticizing lawmakers who skipped the vote. The table applauded Kamlager-Dove after she said her colleagues should have gotten their "raggedy selves" up the steps to vote, per Newsweek.
Sara Haines called the episode a "self-inflicted" wound coming just after Democrats won congressional majorities in the midterms, according to Breitbart.
The excuses varied. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) said on X that she was blocked from entering the Capitol by "a traffic incident and a police escort of a bus during the vote" and that she filed a report of her "NO" vote in the Congressional Record after the gavel. Reps. Laura Gillen and Jonathan Jackson offered similar accounts of a traffic delay, per Newsweek. An aide to Rep. Marilyn Strickland told the Washington Sun she missed the vote by one minute behind a motorcade.
Others cited different reasons. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was in her home state for a veterans event, while Rep. Lou Correa said he was in California ahead of a health procedure, according to Al Jazeera. Rep. Steven Horsford's office cited a personal emergency, and Rep. Brittany Pettersen — who said she helped introduce articles of impeachment against Hegseth in April — said she had been "denied the ability to vote on this motion" without elaborating.
Jackson, Stansbury, Gillen, Strickland, Horsford, Pelosi and Pettersen all said they would have joined Democrats in opposing the referral. A recorded statement in the Congressional Record does not change the tally.
The underlying articles accused Hegseth of abuses of power and illegal military operations, per Al Jazeera. Kamlager-Dove also criticized the secretary over the $100 million rebrand of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, Newsweek reported. President Trump welcomed the outcome, praising Hegseth as a "Great American Patriot," according to the BBC's coverage of the vote.
For Republicans, the result was a clean kill of a politically driven effort led by a lame-duck member who lost his reelection bid and will leave Congress in a few months. For Democrats, it was a week-one embarrassment: a vote they had the strength to win, lost to attendance.
Our Take
Here's the part the legacy media won't say out loud: this was never about Hegseth. Massie's articles were a revenge stunt dressed up as constitutional duty, and every Democrat who touched them knew it. What Tuesday exposed is that the people pushing impeachment hardest couldn't be bothered to walk into the chamber and vote for it. Traffic. A fundraiser down the street. A motorcade. These are the excuses of people who assumed someone else would do the work.
And notice who is furious — not Republicans, but the Left's own megaphone. When Whoopi Goldberg tells Democrats "we can remove you from power," she is reading the mood of voters who turned out in the midterms and got cocktail parties instead. The blue wave bought Democrats a majority and about seven days of discipline.
The real story is the calendar. Democrats take the gavel in January with Hegseth still at the Pentagon and a base that just watched its own leadership fumble a layup. If they can't organize a floor vote, what exactly are they going to organize in 2027? Patriots should be watching what Massie's stunt and the absences it revealed tell us about the new majority before it is sworn in — because the people who couldn't show up Tuesday will be writing the subpoenas next.
