GOP leaders face challenge from lame-duck lawmakers in both parties

Lame-duck lawmakers in the lower chamber are going out with guns blazing.

In a series of extraordinary moves ahead of the midterms, soon-to-depart members forced votes on long-shot impeachments, carried discharge petitions over the top, and hopped the aisle to help the opposing party secure legislative wins — all in defiance of their own leaders.

The agitators hail from different parties; they’re pushing different issues; and they have wildly different motivations for going rogue. But they all have at least two things in common: They won’t be back next year, and they have nothing to lose.

They could also make life difficult for leaders on both sides of the aisle in the postelection session, when Congress must extend government funding or trigger a shutdown, and GOP leaders will be scrambling to secure a few final victories before the year ends.

The dynamics are in a way a mirror of the Senate, where a small handful of departing GOP lawmakers have also asserted a newfound independence given their lame-duck status. Dubbed the “YOLO” caucus, that group includes Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Bill Cassidy (La.), both of whom lost primary contests to President Trump-backed Republicans this summer, as well as Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), who announced his retirement plans last year amid a clash with Trump over the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The challenge for House GOP leaders will be front and center in the earliest days of Congress’s return to Washington, which is scheduled for Nov. 9, when they’ll have to contend immediately with a resolution to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

That proposal is being pushed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime Trump critic whose crusade against the administration has only escalated since he lost his primary to a MAGA challenger who was backed by Trump and pledged his loyalty to the president. (Separately, Massie is also championing a discharge petition on legislation that would force the Justice Department to release all its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker who was once good friends with Trump.)

Massie is well known in the Capitol for opposing foreign interventions, including the Iran war, which he considers illegal because it lacks congressional approval. But he still surprised Washington last week when he unveiled eight impeachment articles against Hegseth, with half of them related to how the Pentagon has conducted that conflict.

The move not only caught GOP leaders off guard but also put them in a bind. The Iran war is unpopular with voters, and a vote on Hegseth would have put some vulnerable Republicans in a tough spot as they fight to retain control of the House in the midterms. GOP leaders avoided that vote by cutting the legislative calendar a day short to get lawmakers out of Washington and on the campaign trail — a move that quickly prompted accusations from Massie and Democrats that Republican leaders fled to dodge a difficult issue.

“They shut down the Legislative Branch of the United States of America because I was outmaneuvering the Speaker to expose a global sex trafficking ring and impeach a rogue cabinet secretary,” Massie wrote Friday on the social platform X. “It was the only way they could stop me.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has dismissed that narrative as “ridiculous,” portraying Massie’s move as a “publicity stunt by someone who wants attention.” But the Speaker has no power to stop the Hegseth vote from happening in the lame-duck period. And there’s also a real chance that Massie’s push to release the Epstein files will hit the floor after the election.

That’s because he and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) say they have enough Republican support to meet the 218-signature threshold to force a vote on the files, even against the wishes of the GOP leaders who control the chamber. Massie said it’s two other lame-duck lawmakers — Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — who have helped to put the petition over the top.

“When we return from recess that @SpeakerJohnson imposed until the election, @RepRoKhanna & I will have 218 names required to force a vote!” Massie wrote on X.

Mace, who lost her bid for governor this summer, also signed a separate discharge petition just before the break on legislation expanding benefits for disabled veterans. In doing so, she became the 218th signature on the petition, paving the way for a potential vote on the legislation in the lame-duck period.

“We signed this discharge petition because enough is enough,” Mace said in a statement.

Norman, meanwhile, is making waves in other ways. He ran unsuccessfully to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and since then he has voted on several occasions against GOP rules, including two episodes in which GOP leaders had to lean on a pair of centrist Democrats to get the underlying legislation to the floor. (Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy, yet another lame-duck lawmaker who lost his run for Texas attorney general, opposed one of those rules.)

Norman also bashed Republican leaders for cutting September’s legislative session short. “The Founders did not envision taking this much time off and still getting paid,” he wrote on X.

Democrats are hardly immune from the trend.

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who is retiring at the end of the term, has crossed the aisle in two high-profile cases to help Johnson advance the Republicans’ late-campaign legislative agenda, even as some of those bills were designed to hurt vulnerable Democrats in November. In both cases, he was joined by Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who’s facing a tough reelection contest in November.

The defections have infuriated fellow Democrats — leaders and rank-and-file members alike — who are fighting to keep their message squarely on the high cost of living under Trump’s second term but continue to face questions about disunity within their own ranks.

“There’s no excuse for it, really,” Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is on a tear of his own. Green, a 22-year House veteran who lost his primary over the summer after Texas’s redistricting, has led the charge for Trump’s impeachment going back to the president’s first term. Those efforts have been cheered by liberals, who want Democrats to fight harder against the administration but have not always been welcomed by leadership.

That was certainly the case when Green forced a Trump impeachment resolution to the floor last week, agitating many of his Democratic colleagues who want to focus squarely on the volatile economy.

All the top Democratic leaders voted “present” and distanced themselves from the effort.

“This is something, oftentimes, I think the right-wing media wants us to talk about,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), the head of the House Democratic Caucus, said of impeaching Trump.

“But it’s not anything that is top of the agenda for House Democrats.”