Absurdity
Johnson Sends Congress Home Early Rather Than Talk About Pete Hegseth
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- House Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the congressional session early this week, cutting off a potential impeachment vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before members had a chance to hold it, which is the legislative equivalent of leaving a restaurant before the check arrives and calling it a diet.
Hegseth, who oversees the United States military and has crusader crosses tattooed across his chest in a choice that apparently clears the Pentagon security background check, has become the most broadly disliked figure in the Trump administration, a category that has historically featured some serious competition.
A new round of polling shows Hegseth's favorability rating underwater with independents, Republican-leaning suburban voters, active military families, and at least three demographics he presumably thought he had locked up. His disapproval has climbed consistently for six months, tracking almost perfectly with the duration of the Iran conflict, which military analysts are calling a grind and which Hegseth recently described in a press briefing as "going extremely well, very much in the winning direction, we're winning it."
He did not provide a map.
Johnson's decision to end the session before the vote could be scheduled drew immediate criticism from Democratic members, and noticeably muted nothing from Republican ones, several of whom spent the week not defending Hegseth in a variety of public forums.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked whether she supported the Speaker's procedural move, said she "absolutely stands behind strong leadership decisions that protect the agenda," which is a sentence assembled from words in an order that technically means nothing.
The decision lands at a particular moment for Hegseth, whose tenure at the Pentagon has included a classified information leak into a Signal group chat that also contained his wife, his brother, and, according to one report, someone described only as "a personal contact in the media space." He later said the information was not classified. The classification markings on the documents said otherwise, in writing, at the top.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reached for comment, said the situation was "concerning from an institutional standpoint," which, from a man who has described every administration since Eisenhower as concerning from an institutional standpoint, lands somewhere between a rebuke and a weather report.
Inside the Pentagon, three senior officials who requested anonymity because they still work there described morale as "complicated." One said the building had developed an informal system in which staff routed sensitive decisions around Hegseth's office through a parallel chain of command that a former deputy described as "basically how we're getting things done now." When asked to respond, a Pentagon spokesperson said Secretary Hegseth "maintains full operational command and is deeply engaged with the warfighting mission on a daily basis."
The spokesperson did not explain what that means.
Hegseth himself addressed the polling numbers at a rally in Tulsa on Thursday, telling the crowd that his unpopularity was proof he was doing the right thing, a rhetorical framework that, if applied consistently, would also vindicate every middle manager who has ever sent a company-wide email about the refrigerator.
Johnson has not announced when Congress will reconvene, or whether the vote will be rescheduled, or what exactly the plan is.
For now, the most powerful legislative body in the world has gone home because talking about Pete Hegseth was too much to ask.
The story we are making fun of: https://boingboing.net/2026/09/28/everybody-hates-pete-hegseth.html