Eight years ago, Democrats harnessed popular anger at Donald Trump to take control of the House. Promising to curb the administration’s excesses, they issued a pile of subpoenas and held Cabinet members in contempt. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan famously vowed to “impeach the motherfucker.” They tried that, twice. In the end, many congressional Democrats concluded, the exercise only hardened partisan allegiances and handed Trump a foil to run against in 2020 and again in 2024.
Democrats think this time will be different. It’s not just that their margin in last week’s midterms was bigger, but that economic discontent lets them tie their investigations to their promise to address the cost of living. Pursuing the Trump family for self-dealing, they intend to argue, serves a higher aim—rectifying a political system rigged toward the rich. “One thing that’s important for people to recognize is that accountability and taking on corruption will make the lives of American families more affordable,” Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, told me. “It will stop the Trumps from stealing from you and giving to themselves.”
Corruption and the cost of living topped the list of concerns for those who gave Democrats their largest popular-vote margin in the House since 1976, when price increases and government malfeasance, exemplified by the Watergate scandal, also infuriated voters. Over the past two years, Republicans have largely ceded their legislative authority to Trump while adopting a see-no-evil approach to allegations of grift and bribery: the first family accumulating billions in crypto wealth, the president pardoning politically connected convicts, the government awarding contracts to firms funding his pet projects. On the campaign trail, Democrats heaped attention on this conduct. Controlling the Oversight Committee and other key bodies means they can try to do something about it. They can demand information and testimony from government officials as well as from private citizens, hold hearings, and make criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
But a lot stands in their way, including divisions within the party over the centrality of accountability to the Democratic agenda. The biggest obstacle is the term-limited, lame-duck president to whom the Supreme Court has granted executive authority and criminal immunity that dissenting justices found more suited to a king. Enforcing subpoenas, in particular, will be difficult as long as the Justice Department remains in Republican hands. Attorney General Todd Blanche affirmed over the weekend on CNN that DOJ plans to represent administration officials who come under scrutiny from Democrats. The Justice Department routinely represents executive-branch officials, but regulations bar its lawyers from defending officials whose conduct falls outside the scope of their employment, or when representation would not be in the interest of the United States. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that Trump is “willing to work with anyone to continue delivering victories for hardworking Americans. If Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people.”
Trump-aligned defense attorneys are expecting big business, several people close to the White House told me. For almost two years, the business of white-collar law has been down because the Trump administration has used a light touch on corporate and securities fraud, pardoned dozens of high-profile white-collar criminals, and overseen cutbacks of staff once devoted to consumer protection and other kinds of regulatory enforcement. Congressional investigations might be bad news for the Trump family. For the lawyers who want to represent them, it’s a different story. As one person put it to me, they’re “positively salivating.”
How the Democrats go about their investigations matters both substantively and politically. “I am not interested in retribution,” James Talarico, who answered Democratic prayers by winning a Senate seat in Texas, told Fox News. “The people of Texas did not elect me last night for retribution.” Some of his soon-to-be colleagues think they were elected for precisely the opposite reason: bipartisanship. “I want to become Jerry Moran’s best friend,” Adam Hamilton, the incoming Democratic senator from Kansas, said of his state’s senior senator, a Republican. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said that accountability shouldn’t come at the cost of a populist economic agenda: “We cannot spend all of our time investigating Trump.” Others seem to favor a maximalist approach. “We’re going to toss out subpoenas like Mardi Gras beads,” Representative Analilia Mejia, a New Jersey Democrat, crowed on social media.
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Garcia, for his part, hardly struck a conciliatory tone, issuing a two-word statement on Election Night: “Lawyer up.” At a convention put on by the progressive network Crooked Media over the weekend, he elaborated on his motivation with a tongue-in-cheek statement: “Maybe it’s because I’m gay, but pettiness is a thing. I’m mad.” He corrected himself. “It’s not pettiness; it’s a desire for real justice. And I think that we should not let up on that.” Garcia has pledged to conduct oversight in four broad areas: the “Trump Crime Family,” as he calls it; abuses at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security; corporate corruption; and what he considers to be the cover-up of the Epstein files by the Trump administration. He told me that the committee’s reach will surprise people, extending to anyone who may have information about the Trump family’s dealings even though “your last name may not be Trump.”
Not every investigation, however, will be aimed at the president’s clan. Cartoonishly predatory corporate practices are easy targets that can unite different factions of the party. One is price gouging, which Hakeem Jeffries, who’s expected to serve as House speaker, highlighted in his letter announcing his run for speaker. Garcia also emphasized concerns about surveillance pricing—when companies use sensitive data and AI algorithms to set different prices for different people. But consumer protection, he told me, requires an honest accounting from the Trump administration. For instance, he wants to expose U.S. efforts to open up the Venezuelan oil market for the very same companies that have been raising gas prices. Chuck Schumer, who’s likely to return as Senate majority leader, said high costs were his priority. “If we just did corruption, we’d be a loser,” he told The New York Times. “If we didn’t do any corruption—you got to do some but not let it overshadow and take away what we can do on costs.” His rhetoric about corporate malfeasance has been milder than that of some colleagues, but he did introduce a bill, in March, to break up meatpacking monopolies as a way to lower the cost of food.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told me the causes of the most punishing price increases over the past two years—Trump’s war in Iran and his tariff war against much of the world—also involve unconstitutional usurpation of congressional authority. He drew a comparison to the Boston Tea Party: Did the Sons of Liberty hurl the wooden chests into the harbor because of the price of tea, or because of an unjust taxing authority and a state-backed monopoly? The answer is both. “A corrupt political system makes life unaffordable for the vast majority of people,” Raskin said.
Democrats say they’ve learned lessons from the last time they conducted oversight of Trump, after the 2018 election. “We need to be more aggressive, more nimble, and more innovative,” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who is set to lead the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, told me. Few Democrats with influence are talking about impeaching the president, though they are trying to eject Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before the new Congress is even seated. Some Democrats told me that a successful move against a Cabinet member might operate like a pressure valve, releasing some of the heat they might otherwise feel to act immediately against the president and giving them time to address other emergencies, such as reinstating enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits to reverse premium spikes for millions of enrollees.
With their previous House majority, Democrats spent years seeking the president’s tax returns, which they obtained in 2022, following a protracted legal fight. Other kinds of records might be more relevant today. Garcia and Raskin last month demanded that Trump preserve his communications with AI chatbots. Raskin said they’ve done more advance planning this time around: lining up witnesses, legislative inquiries, and hearings.
Blumenthal said he’s especially focused on accountability for the crypto industry, because of the wealth the Trump family has derived from it and the aggressive ways that industry players have sought to buy influence in Washington. Last week, the Connecticut senator issued letters to wide-ranging subjects of Democratic investigations—including World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by Trump family members and family friends, as well as tech companies and other known donors to the White House ballroom. The letters effectively threatened them with subpoenas if they didn’t voluntarily produce requested records by early next year.
Democrats are signaling that they will lean on private-sector actors and government whistleblowers as a way to unearth information that the administration may seek to keep buried. Large corporations, they believe, have an incentive to cooperate. “Companies that went MAGA are going to be doing penance,” one Democratic aide told me.
Trump and the people around him have different incentives, and are likely to revive the approach of near-blanket noncompliance adopted in his first term. That points to a problem for Democrats: Congress lacks strong enforcement mechanisms. An indictment on contempt-of-Congress charges must be secured by a U.S. attorney, and Democrats would be foolish to believe that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in D.C., would take such a matter to a grand jury. (Trump’s allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro served time in prison for ignoring subpoenas related to the congressional investigation into January 6, but they were prosecuted during the Biden administration.) Going to court to compel compliance with a subpoena, known as civil contempt, also presents challenges. And a congressional power called inherent contempt, which involves directing the sergeant-at-arms to arrest an obstinate witness, hasn’t been used for almost a century.
I asked Garcia whether he could envision people landing in jail as part of the oversight process, and he demurred, saying the issue would need to be hashed out at the Justice Department or litigated in the courts. But, he offered, “if you have broken the law, there should be accountability.” Blumenthal thinks that Trump’s waning political power may persuade more people to cooperate voluntarily than once seemed possible. “Donald Trump is now or will be within months a lame-duck president,” he said. “It’s a sinking ship, and the rats are gonna jump. A lot of them will say, I don’t need the criminal jeopardy. I don’t need civil exposure. I’m out of here. I’m under no illusions that we’re going to see top administration officials all of a sudden coming to us with eager cooperation. But there may be some.”
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Democrats also see legislative avenues for countering corruption. Schumer told my colleague Franklin Foer that banning members of Congress from trading stocks is among his early priorities. Legislation to tighten campaign-finance rules or restore the independence of the Justice Department would face more resistance, David Rapallo, a Georgetown Law professor and former House Oversight staff director, predicts. Some Democrats will want to try. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’s expected to serve as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, has introduced anti-corruption legislation that would not just bar members of Congress, senior federal officials, and judges from owning or trading individual stocks, but also impose new lobbying restrictions and taxes, mandate expanded financial disclosures for officeholders, and establish a new enforcement agency to investigate ethics violations and impose civil penalties.
Democratic gains at the state level present other opportunities for oversight. Beyond the Trump family, no figure has attracted more Democratic scrutiny than Elon Musk. There are almost too many reasons why—the billions his companies receive in federal contracts, the sweeping cuts he oversaw to the federal government through DOGE, the purported use of his AI chatbot Grok in the planning to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. And then there’s the more than $445 million he spent trying to elect Republicans in federal races this cycle, according to the research nonprofit OpenSecrets, about $226 million of which went to committees focused on Texas, where core elements of Musk’s business empire are based. The spending didn’t have its desired outcome; Democrats won every statewide race in Texas.
One of those Democrats is the incoming attorney general, Nathan Johnson. Johnson told me he plans to grow his office and is looking for experts in specific areas, including consumer protection, antitrust, and public contracting. Musk hasn’t said much publicly since the election results. But he did seem to acknowledge the difficulty he could encounter here on Earth when he wrote on X, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”
“I’m definitely not on a mission to take Elon Musk down,” Johnson assured me. “I don’t believe that’s an appropriate mission for the attorney general’s office. But there’s not going to be a force field around him maintained by his loyal right-wing allies while I’m attorney general.” Johnson cast his lot with those Democrats who believe that accountability is a necessary component of a successful economic agenda. On the campaign trail, he said, the anti-corruption message resonated because voters correctly perceive that they’re victims of rapacious corporate behavior. “There’s a general feeling that we’re all just prey and don’t have control over our own economic lives,” he said.
After the 1976 election, the last time either party exceeded the House popular-vote margin seen last week, Democrats enjoyed a trifecta in Congress and the White House. They tried to make government work better by reorganizing the federal civil service and establishing independent inspectors general. But they failed to enact other key priorities, such as tax reform, a national health-insurance system, and a consumer-protection agency. Their ambitious agenda ran aground on stagflation, aggressive business lobbying, and bitter internal party disputes. President Jimmy Carter and other centrists moved away from New Deal liberalism toward economic moderation and deregulation, setting up a clash with the anti-corporate agenda of the party’s left wing. “The American reality is that money is concentrated in the hands of very few people,” Ron Dellums, a Democratic congressman from California, said in 1976, “with the rest of us forced to fight each other for a share of what’s left.”
The same sentiment could have been voiced this year, half a century later. The question is whether a winning campaign message can translate into actual anti-corruption governance.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.
*Illustration sources: Andrew Harnik / Getty; Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg / Getty; Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty; Manaure Quintero / Bloomberg / Getty; San Antonio Express-News / Hearst Newspapers / Getty; U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary Democrats.