Progressives in Congress Can Now Sway Funding, Investigations, Health Policy

This week Donald Trump and the Republican Party suffered one of the most vehement repudiations of a sitting president in modern U.S. history. After the most expensive midterm election season ever, Democrats surged to take control of the House of Representatives and, more surprisingly, the Senate. They won seats in terrain that was previously thought well beyond the reach of the party: Senate seats in South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, and Texas. Democratic candidates currently lead Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi as well. Even Texas’s longtime governor, Greg Abbott, was defeated by Democrat Gina Hinojosa, in a shocking upset that most prognosticators had not considered possible before Election Day.

With control of the House and Senate, Democrats will have vastly more power to counter President Donald Trump and his ultra-right-wing administration. How far the party is willing to go in combating Trump’s extremism, though, will be a function of both the tools available to the party and how vigorously members of the party push for confrontation with Trump.

Among the most potent tools Democrats will have in the next Congress will be the ability to conduct investigations with subpoena power. Investigations can be launched across different House and Senate committees, all of which will be chaired by Democrats, meaning that many investigations into the administration could run simultaneously. Democrats could, in effect, create an unending parade of public investigatory hearings that will drag Trump’s allies, inside and outside the administration, in front of TV cameras for interrogations. A prime target for congressional investigations could be Trump and his family’s dealings with cryptocurrency companies and foreign governments, which have drawn scrutiny for their barely disguised quid pro quo and pay-to-play arrangements.

This story is part of the series Taking Back the Public Commons.

Democrats will also have broad control over appropriations and sweeping discretion in how agencies across the federal government are funded. This opens the door to Democrats stripping significant resources from some of the policies that have come to define Trump’s second term, including funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). DHS funding will run out in mid-December, before the new Congress is even seated. Democrats, who should feel emboldened by the midterm results, may take this opportunity to exert pressure on the Trump administration to enact ICE reforms. The administration could be more amenable to negotiating with Democrats now, when Republicans still hold majorities in Congress, rather than in a few months, when Democrats can pass legislation without Republicans’ input.

Unpopular foreign policy entanglements, like the war in Iran, could be upended by Democrats in the next Congress.

Unpopular foreign policy entanglements, like the war in Iran, could also be upended by Democrats in the next Congress. Democrats could pass another war powers resolution directing the administration to end U.S. hostilities with Iran, like the one that narrowly failed in September. They could also push to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, an idea that’s gained momentum as the war in Iran has unraveled. Reporting in recent days has revealed that Trump, with prodding from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been seriously considering massive strikes on Iran in the days after the midterms. Both Trump and the Israeli government anticipate that the U.S.’s military incursions into Iran will become substantially harder to maintain after the new Congress is seated.

Democrats may also be more targeted in their efforts to push back against Trump’s corruption and bullying. Congressional Democrats have recently said they’re looking at ways they can throttle the administration’s sham investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s citizenship status.

The number of card-carrying democratic socialists on the Democratic side of the aisle will increase, from two in the last session, to eight.

The effectiveness of all of these strategies is, of course, dependent on how inclined Democrats are to play hardball with the administration. This is where the progressive bloc of representatives will have particular influence. As of the morning of November 5, the Congressional Progressive Caucus looks poised to have at least 105 members by the time the next Congress is seated, in January. That would be just over 40 percent of the approximately 255 seats that major news outlets are predicting Democrats will win. The number of card-carrying democratic socialists on the Democratic side of the aisle will also increase, from two in the last session, to eight in the next. This tension — between taking a measured approach and more bellicose confrontation — is likely to play out in internal debates between Democrats for the duration of the 120th Congress.

The raw numbers may understate the degree to which voters have swung left through 2026. Democrats running on unapologetically progressive programs won races far outside of the deep-blue urban districts that had, to this point, been the only areas where progressive candidates had found success. Candidates like Abdul El-Sayed won statewide in Michigan, a perennial purple state, where reams of outside spending and overt Islamophobia and racism failed to sink his campaign. El-Sayed ran on a promise to implement Medicare for All; even former President Barack Obama, no champion of single-payer health care, recently told voters that, in Congress, El-Sayed would “finish the job” his administration started by guaranteeing health care to all Americans.

In the last Congress, progressive voices were easier for the larger caucus to ignore. That is no longer the case.

Obama’s about-face on stumping for single-payer health care, to say nothing of his appearing with El-Sayed on the campaign trail while other Democrats actively undermined the latter’s campaign, speaks to the traction that El-Sayed’s brand of politics has with the Democratic electorate. In the last Congress, progressive voices were easier for the larger caucus to ignore. They were less numerous, and the popularity of many of their signature policies was untested with large parts of the Democratic base.

That is no longer the case. After a blockbuster primary season in which progressive candidates repeatedly bested moderate ones across the country, those same candidates have now shown that they can win in general elections, too. As the 120th Congress begins, then, progressives might have the best opportunity in decades to influence the direction of the party.

One topic sure to stir intra-caucus disagreement will be whether to pursue impeachment of Trump again. Progressives have been generally in favor of another impeachment proceeding, even though the high bar to conviction in the Senate means that Trump is unlikely to be removed from office. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, argued last year for impeaching Trump over his war with Iran, for which he did not seek congressional approval.

Democrats will still be constrained by the White House’s veto power, the reactionary Supreme Court, and the executive overreach that has become a hallmark of both Trump administrations.

Then, of course, progressives could pursue a more combative and confrontational course with their own party. Progressive activists and left-leaning members of Congress have so far been dissatisfied with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s perceived inability to meaningfully challenge the Trump administration. Jeffries has protested that, without majorities in either chamber of Congress, and facing a Republican president with zero interest in bipartisan comity, his hands have been tied. With Jeffries now poised to lead the majority in the House, that will all change.

Axios reported recently that a group of progressive existing and soon-to-be members of Congress, informally dubbed “The Bloc,” are already thinking about how to push Jeffries to adopt more progressive policy. The Democrats’ blowout win might complicate progressives’ nascent plans to hold up Jeffries’s confirmation until they extract some concessions from him on their agenda. However, Jeffries will presumably want to display a united front across the party heading into the next Congress and progressives may use that leverage to extract promises from Jeffries that he’ll act on things like Medicare for All, defunding ICE, and halting weapons shipments to Israel — all parts of the progressive agenda that have caused major consternation among centrist Democrats.

Ultimately, Democrats will still be constrained by the White House’s veto power, the reactionary Supreme Court, and the executive overreach that has become a hallmark of both Trump administrations. Where progressives will have influence, though, will lie in their ability to push Democrats to do the most they can with what they have.

This story was co-published with Truthout.

Sam Rosenthal is the political director at RootsAction and serves on the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Electoral Committee. He was formerly a staffer at Our Revolution and lives in Washington, D.C.