WASHINGTON — Before lawmakers even began voting on his effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was teeing up another uncomfortable vote for his party, this time a resolution directing President Donald Trump to end the Iran war.

All year long, Massie, a libertarian who was ousted after feuding with Trump, has used arcane procedural maneuvers to exert extraordinary control over the House floor, clogging up the schedule with politically tricky votes for the GOP against the wishes of its leaders.

Speaker Mike Johnson has sent the House home early twice this year to shield Republicans from voting on measures that Massie has raised, first on releasing files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and again on the impeachment resolution.

With just a few weeks left on the legislative calendar before the GOP loses control of Congress and Massie surrenders his seat, he shows no signs of stopping, promising more forced votes and inconvenient moments on the floor even after his impeachment drive failed to pick up a single Republican vote.

On Wednesday, Massie secured enough bipartisan support for his bid to force the House to vote on another law tied to the Epstein files, this one to compel the release of more files and allow for lawsuits to obtain withheld material.

“I’ll give them every chance I can for them to vote for sanity before I leave,” Massie, 55, said in an interview after the vote to block the Hegseth impeachment charges. “And if they pass on the sanity vote, then — I mean, they’re all going to be up for election in 2028.”

It is a fitting coda to Massie’s 14-year career in Congress. Known as “Mr. No” for much of his time on Capitol Hill, the Kentucky Republican has exulted in weaponizing the minutiae of congressional procedure to suit his libertarian agenda of shrinking government, slashing spending and disentangling the United States from foreign conflicts.

In 2015, he helped write the motion to oust Speaker John Boehner that ultimately sent the Ohio Republican into an early retirement, a screed framed on his office wall. In 2020, he single-handedly called the House back to cast an in-person vote on the $2 trillion coronavirus pandemic stimulus bill, a one-man revolt that sent lawmakers across the country scrambling back to the Capitol, earning him heaps of bipartisan scorn.

More recently, he has gleefully played the role of his party’s foil as Trump has commanded near-total loyalty from other Republicans. In addition to the Epstein files and the Hegseth impeachment, he forced a vote on whether to oust Johnson for allowing a Ukraine aid package to come to a vote.

He also refused to back Trump’s marquee tax and spending cuts legislation because he argued it added too much to the debt, and has repeatedly voted against the war in Iran. He backed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, even joining him on the campaign trail.

All of it has earned Massie invectives from the top of his party all the way down. Trump called him “a total loser.” Hegseth at a news conference on Tuesday dismissed the impeachment resolution as “a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment,” led by “one disgruntled guy.”

By the end of the day, Massie’s GOP colleagues were piling on.

“Massie losing his primary doesn’t make policy disagreements impeachable offenses,” Rep. William Timmons of South Carolina wrote on social media.

Massie met his defeat with equanimity.

“The Republican conference hit an iceberg on Nov. 3, and I felt like I was bringing them a life raft,” he said in the interview after the vote. “I felt like the most likely people to vote for this wouldn’t be the ones who lost their elections, but the ones who are looking toward 2028 and are trying to put some daylight between themselves and the president. And none of them decided to get on my life raft.”

Massie, almost shrugging, continued: “The whole town has lost it over Trump. It’s a form of Trump derangement syndrome, where they can’t break away from Trump. They can’t even cut a path that’s a little bit away from Trump.”

There is, famously, little love lost between the two men. Trump marshaled his power as the most influential force in Republican primaries to find and back a GOP challenger to Massie, Ed Gallrein, who prevailed earlier this year in a race that became the most expensive primary in the country.

“I think because I’m the only one who has broken from this administration, it was easy to make an example of me,” he said.

In the interview on Tuesday, he said he worried that once he was gone, no Republican would have the nerve or ability to employ the kinds of guerrilla tactics with House procedures that he had made his calling card. Massie has only been able to circumvent House leaders with the support of a handful of other Republicans who will also be leaving Congress next year.

“I would like to transfer this knowledge to somebody,” Massie said, “but I don’t know that people would do anything with it. They’re terrified.”

Instead, he predicted that Republicans would “stay in this suicide pact with Trump, and the Democrats, recognizing that, are going to force some crazy votes” on the president’s statements and actions.

Not long after the failed impeachment vote, it was Democrats who signaled they would follow Massie’s lead once he was gone. Rep.-elect Richard Ojeda, D-N.C., who flipped a Republican-held seat in one of the early upsets of last week’s midterm elections, approached Massie in a hallway in the Capitol to thank him.

Ojeda, using an expletive, told Massie: “We’ll finish this next session.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Catie Edmondson/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2026 The New York Times Company