Suppose We Do Win Both House and Senate. Then What?

  

My friend in Ontario is frustrated, as I can well imagine. As Trump continues to drive our country over a cliff — and drag his country over with it — he has asked me just what difference a blue takeover of Congress might actually make.

A good question, in and of itself. But then he asks, “Even if there is a change in Congress, what could that do if Trump goes around them anyway?”

My answer to both was as glib as it was unhelpful: Who knows, I said, but we need to flip Congress anyway.

Even if Democrats can capture both House and Senate, their ability to push back will be limited. They’ll be able to prevent things — crazy new laws, egregious appointments, corrupt funding — and that’s not nothing. But prevention isn’t cure, and given Trump’s personal chokehold on the world, a lot of curing will be desperately needed.

Over the next two years the headwinds will be fierce. Even a strongly Democratic Congress will have little more than a larger platform for showing the country what’s been done to it, and by whom. Any laws they pass will be of symbolic value only, since Trump will veto them all.  Without serious help from Republicans — unlikely but not impossible — it’s hard to see much getting done. The current game of Whack-A-Mole will continue, with a few more hammers available. But progress over the next two years will mostly be a holding action, incremental and mostly unsatisfying.

Not that there aren’t tools at the disposal of Congress, and they need to be used regardless of the success rate. The two biggest are investigations and appropriations.

Investigations will hopefully get underway immediately, and Democrats would have full subpoena power. They’ll be able to compel testimony from anyone. It’s hard to know where the priorities will lie. The Epstein files would be a good start, but there are any number of major characters with big-time criminal exposure, some of whom need to be removed from the government. Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel are the most obvious, but we all have our favorite Republican villains.

Congressional Democrats will have their favorites as well. There will no doubt be some haggling among them, but the idea will be clear: Expose the corruption. Get them on the record, under oath. Show them for the criminals they are. Hold them accountable. Congress may not be able to put them in prison, but it can damn well show the world why they belong there.

As we know from the House impeachment hearings of Trump 1.0, these investigations will be major media events. This will come to be seen as the point. We will be as entertained as we are horrified, which might have to be an end in itself. Clear victories will be elusive — with the DOJ and FBI in hostile hands, any findings or referrals from the committee will be ignored by the government, even as they’re seen by everyone else. Fox viewers will, as usual, be exempt from confronting any ambient reality.

But wouldn’t we all like to hear the testimony of generals about the real condition of the military? About the bases lost, missiles depleted, logistics broken down, morale sapped, all under Hegseth’s weenie-waving leadership?

Wouldn’t we want to see Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff testify about how they mixed business with diplomacy in their shady romps through Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Albania, and various emirates?

Wouldn’t we all like to know about the sweetheart contracts that went into Trump’s pet projects in DC? The Reflecting Pool, the helipad, the ballroom, the Kennedy Center? Wouldn’t we enjoy following that money?

And while we’re at it, wouldn’t we love to hear from Rudy Giuliani about cash for pardons? From Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the measles epidemic he started? From Brooke Rollins about the undermining of our farming sector? From Elon Musk about the demolition of USAID and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of children?

This is just a random smattering of what needs to be brought to light, if not to justice. Honestly, there is too much corruption for any one Congress to deal with. But they can divide and conquer. If each committee, in both House and Senate, launches one investigation, they’d be off and running.

But let’s turn to the other tool: appropriations. The House really can turn off the money spigot, though it will be more preventative than assertive. Whoever runs the new Appropriations Committee will be able to restrict or cut off funding to any number of constitutionally fraught activities. It won’t be able to stop those activities.

Iran, for instance. A War Powers resolution would presumably pass a Democratic Congress in short order. Congress can then restrict funding for all sorts of war-related activities and materiel. Couple that with hearings about how the US devolved into a second-rate military power in less than a year, and we can suppose Trump will not be happy with Congress’ attitude towards his war.

The power of the purse extends to the whole immigration disaster, as well. Congress can attach conditions to the funding of ICE and CBP. That wouldn’t stop the raids or the deportations, but it could slow them down to where political and judicial forces can catch up. Again, it’s a holding action. Real pushback is elusive.

I haven’t even gotten to what my friend most cares about, which is Canada’s situation under the crush of Trump’s tariffs. Unfortunately, there isn’t much Congress can do about that under current law.

So far, it’s been the courts, including SCOTUS, that have weighed in on the tariffs, and they’ve uniformly found them illegal. That Trump keeps finding flimsy legal pretexts to impose new ones is as uncanny as it is frightening.

So I haven’t much encouragement to offer Canada, as long as Trump remains in power. Which, it must be said, is not automatic.

There are several scenarios that could play out in the next year, all of them fraught. If Trump ups his crazy game — which he always does — even the Trumpy-est of Republicans will be scratching their heads, wondering if they’re really willing to die for this moron.

Impeachment is still on the table. There is ample evidence of high crimes. Two-thirds vote in the Senate is still a high bar, but who knows how many Republicans might cross the line if enough were at stake?

The 25^th Amendment is still on the table as well. If JD Vance can convince the dopes in the Cabinet that Trump is about to kill them all, they can invoke his removal at any time. Unlikely, but not impossible.

There is also a chance he won’t live out his term. The medical profession, which once refrained from diagnosing anyone based on video alone, has overcome its reluctance for clear and present reasons. Most agree that Trump’s doctors are juggling several co-morbidities at once — both physical and mental — not to mention a level of stress that must be off the charts. The fact that Trump keeps bragging about recent cognitive tests — which he evidently thinks are IQ tests — should be ringing more alarm bells than we’ve heard. Again, the 25^th Amendment would be nice, but the reaper could intervene at any time.

So what happens if that happens? For one thing, we’d have to know it happened. How would we find out? With Natalie Harp cranking out the Truth Social posts and Stephen Miller running the White House, there’s no telling how long a dead president with an auto-pen can stay in office.

But assuming the word gets out eventually, the only thing we know for sure is that Vance would be president. Scary, yes, but he does have four young children and a presumed interest in their survival. He might even roll back a few tariffs before they eat Ohio, his home state, alive.

Strange to think of JD Vance as anyone’s best-case scenario. But for Canada, he might just be.