Belknap, Mayorkas, Hegseth: what the two cabinet impeachments teach
A cabinet secretary has been impeached twice in American history. The first was a Secretary of War. Both cases say something about what happens next.
Presidential impeachment has a familiar shape: hearings, a Judiciary Committee vote, managers, a Senate trial with the Chief Justice presiding. Cabinet impeachment barely has a shape at all, because it has happened twice.
1876: the Secretary of War
William Belknap ran the War Department under Ulysses Grant. Army trading posts were lucrative monopolies, and the Belknap household had been receiving regular payments connected to the post at Fort Sill for years. When the House investigation reached him in early 1876, he went to the White House on the morning of March 2 and resigned. Grant accepted.
The House impeached him that afternoon anyway, by unanimous vote. The Senate held a trial that ran into August. When the vote came, 37 senators voted to convict and 25 to acquit, a majority but not the two-thirds the Constitution requires. The acquitting senators mostly did not dispute the facts; they believed the Senate lost jurisdiction when he resigned. Belknap never held office again and was never prosecuted.
Two things survive from Belknap. First, the House may impeach a cabinet officer, and the Senate may try one; the constitutional question was settled by doing it. Second, resignation is not a guaranteed escape. A majority of the Senate was willing to convict a man who had already left.
2024: the Secretary of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached on February 13, 2024, on two articles related to border enforcement, by a vote of 214 to 213 after a first attempt had failed a week earlier. The House sent the articles to the Senate in April. On April 17, the Senate voted on party lines that neither article stated an impeachable offense and dismissed both without a trial. The whole Senate proceeding took an afternoon.
Mayorkas teaches that a bare House majority impeaches, that the Senate can dispose of articles by a simple majority without a trial if it chooses, and that partisanship, not the merits, was decisive in both chambers. Critics of the Mayorkas impeachment argued that policy disagreements are not high crimes. Whatever you think of that, it is a distinction with a difference here: the Hegseth articles are not about policy choices. They allege violations of specific statutes, with section numbers, and of specific votes of Congress.
What that means for a third case
The Hegseth resolution would be the third cabinet impeachment and, like the first, the impeachment of a Secretary of War. The statutory precision of the articles is closer to Belknap than to Mayorkas. The politics are closer to Mayorkas: a narrow majority, party-line lines, a Senate that can make it vanish.
The Belknap precedent has one more thing to say, about a possibility no one is discussing yet. If the Secretary were to leave office before the House acts, whether by resignation or by a reshuffle after the election, the House could impeach anyway and the Senate could vote on disqualification from future office. It has been done. It is the reason "high crimes and misdemeanors" includes the remedy of disqualification at all.
Read how the mechanism works on our explainer page.
All claims attributed to "the resolution" are from the articles of impeachment introduced September 15, 2026 (PDF). They are allegations, not adjudicated findings. Secretary Hegseth denies wrongdoing.