Where Democrats Go From Here
Democrats won the House in a midterm-elections wave on Tuesday, taking at least 28 seats—some from presumed-safe Republican incumbents—and leading in more races that have yet to be finalized. "Tomorrow will be a new day in America," said minority leader Nancy Pelosi when the party crossed the threshold necessary to earn the gavel. After failing on Paul Ryan's watch to perform any oversight duties with respect to the slow-motion grift that is the Trump administration, Congress, as an institution, has a lot of catching up to do; Democrats have already made clear that they will be happy to facilitate the process.
As exciting as opening a battery of Trump-related investigations may be—to say nothing of the other I-word, which is discussed in Democratic circles in only the most breathless of whispers—winning the House only guarantees, at best, a Congress defined by gridlock. As expected, Republicans retained control of the Senate, and Donald Trump is still very much in the White House. Remember that the past two years of partisan stalemates occurred despite a Republican monopoly on political power in Washington; in a divided government, lawmakers are about to be worse at their jobs than ever.
Even if they cannot enact the legislative agenda of their dreams, however, Democrats can still make it a politically and electorally productive two years by talking about that agenda at every opportunity; they should be moving bold, progressive legislation through the lower chamber, no matter what fate it suffers after that. Last week, Pelosi promised that a then-hypothetical Democratic House majority would first tackle campaign-finance reform, the scourge of partisan gerrymandering, and the voting rights at which the Supreme Court has steadily chipped away. From there, she said, they'd work on lowering prescription-drug costs, investing in infrastructure, and passing a long-promised DACA fix. Left unsaid was the fact that most of these proposals are non-starters for Republicans—and that by passing them, Democrats will be daring Trump and Mitch McConnell to say no to each of them, one by one.
A key feature of unified government—especially for a party with top-line priorities as unpopular as the GOP's—is that it affords leaders the near-absolute ability to control the debate. In the 115th Congress, for example, Democrats had few bona fide opportunities to make the case for Medicare for all, or a clean DREAM Act, or any of their other ideas with much broader popular appeal, because voters had little incentive to pay attention to proposals with no realistic chance of making it to a committee vote, much less to the House floor, much less to the president's desk. (This is part of the reason why Democrats are "bad at messaging": They have had so few chances to actually talk.) Instead, Democratic politicians were stuck issuing glum press releases about their dead-end bills, and then more glum press releases whenever Ryan and company cheerfully plunged ahead with something else.
Taking control of the House changes that dynamic, because it gives Democrats the chance to pass ambitious bills along party lines, and to get Republicans on the record about things they really, really don't want to talk about. For the first time since 2014, GOP legislators can be forced to take votes that reveal whether they care about, say, keeping dark money out of politics, or oppose common-sense gun-safety legislation, or are against measures that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Americans like these things, and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump do not; now Democrats can make them say so in public.
Admittedly, this will require Democrats to stop doing a thing at which they've excelled of late, which is negotiate with themselves in a doomed effort to secure the cooperation of an opposing party that does not operate in good faith, and that has no interest in bipartisanship. Even if Trump doesn't sign one of their bills into law—which, in the moment, will look bad and feel frustrating!—the effort still matters, because Republicans will be making tough choices for which they'll have to answer to constituents. They will be conceding their contempt for minorities, and women, and poor people, and other vulnerable groups of Americans, instead of relying on the security blanket that two years of one-party rule afforded them.
The Senate map in 2018 was brutal, but the landscape in 2020 will be kinder to Democrats, and there will be a presidential election to win, too. That's when these efforts will matter: This election was a rebuke to Republicans, and divided government gives Democrats the chance to show voters what they'd do if given meaningful political power next time around. They can and should demand the president's tax returns, and probe his ties to Russia, and investigate his various other forms of malfeasance and malevolence. If they want to be rewarded even more handsomely during the next referendum on Trumpism, they have to do the hard work of governing first.
