No, Jeffries didn't screw up the Hegseth impeachment

 Okay, now that I said what I really think of Jeffries and Schumer, I'm also gonna defend them on something again. Recently, Thomas Massie, the disgruntled libertarian republican from Kentucky who got the mob boss treatment from Trump, spent his last days in congress filing impeachment charges against Pete Hegseth for his crimes against humanity as secretary of defense war. He talked explicitly about Trump bombing that little girl's school in Iran, which is a very clear and flagrant violation of international law. I know the US is often criticized for bombing civilians on accident, but in defense to former presidents, it was by accident, typically, and such behavior was simply collaterial damage. The obvious goal of the president was NOT to kill civilians, but to kill terrorists, with some civilians happening to get in the way. However, with Trump's war in Iran, the cruelty is the point, and it's obvious Trump and his officials like hegseth are explicitly targetting civilians and explicitly dont seem to care if they commit war crimes. Holding such actors responsible is the right thing to do, and I wanna see more of this.

However, the impeachment measure failed. It fell short by a few votes because we still have the old republican congress there, and apparently, Massie did not coordinate this effort with democrats at all. He just did it, and several democrats who could have voted for it were out of the building at the time and couldnt get back in time to vote for it, causing the measure to narrowly fail. And for some reason, this is Hakeem Jeffries' fault? Look, I think Jeffries is useless. But he's not actually incompetent, his incompetence is  more of the "weaponized" variety. I'm in the camp of wanting to replace him. However, I like to keep things real and keep our discussions to substantive criticism here. And in this regard, I dont blame Jeffries at all. he and other democrats in leadership were apparently caught off guard and weren't in any position to actually do anything useful. They also promise to take up the topic again when democrats control congress next year. So apparently this pressure to oust jeffries after his original timid statement about not doing impeachments and moving forward is resonating, where even if we dont remove him, we could at least pressure him to actually get stuff done. But yeah, I'd lay off him on this specific topic. This is just a republican chucking a spear at Xerxes to show that a god king can bleed on his way out the door (300 reference). Just a completely random thing that the democrats were clearly unprepared for, and that's why it failed (and in all fairness if republicans were equally prepared it would've failed anyway as they'd get their people in to vote against it).