Voters did their part. Now it’s Congress’s turn.
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Last week’s elections were a historic repudiation of the MAGA movement and its leaders’ venal vision for governing. Voters elected Democrats to seats that last had Democratic representation when members of the Lost and Greatest Generations frequented salons. After finally eking out a victory in Mississippi, Scott Colom will be the Magnolia State’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. The nearly century and a half wait illustrates what happens when leaders decide a reckoning is more trouble than it’s worth. And it’s a lesson this new generation must internalize.
There are basic explanations for Americans’ harsh rebuke of President Trump and the Republican Party. Osita Nwanevu wrote in The Guardian that, “high prices, an idiotic war abroad, a war being waged, here at home, against American cities and immigrant families [and] naked corruption in Washington in the service of adding filigrees to the president’s fascism” were too much for voters to stomach.
In The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie argued that the GOP broke the Notorious B.I.G.’s fourth Crack Commandment and got high on its own supply, cheering as Trump cranked the corruption, revanchism, and authoritarianism dials to their limits. It would be presumptuous to say we have oracles on staff; none of us predicted this margin of victory. But we did expect corporate elites to shape the Trump administration’s agenda. And we were confident that once people saw the material impacts of that corrupt approach, voters would thoroughly reject it.
That’s why we’ve long maintained that policing these elites is the most viable path to reviving a durable politics that animates broad sections of the public. To their credit, Democrats ran on a promise to root out corruption, connecting the dizzying levels of grift in Washington to the administration’s indifference to affordability concerns. As my colleague KJ Boyle aptly noted in The American Prospect, anti-corruption and affordability are “two great tastes that taste great together.”
You know what else voters heard and thought, “hmm, sounds tasty”? Newly elected Democrats’ embrace of economic populism to castigate a billionaire class that’s deeply averse to accountability. “In 2024, “billionaire” or “billionaires” were referenced on six of 32 Democratic Senate campaign websites” in open and non-open seat races combined. But a survey of 2026 Democratic campaign websites found that 20 of 23 open-seat candidates featured themes directly denouncing billionaire control of our media, politics, and economy. Any surprise that deeply resonated in every corner of the country? Not here! Any Watchdog Weekly subscriber has definitely read the RDP screed: picking fights with elite villains and cracking down on corporate wrongdoing is both good governance and good politics.
One way to do that is through congressional oversight. It’s reasonable to expect that what we know about Trump and his allies’ extreme exploitation of the systemic rot that has festered for decades only scratches the surface. After all, he fired more than a dozen inspectors general within a week of taking office and replaced them with lackeys.
Oversight is how this incoming set of representatives and senators unearth key facts. Facts about how expensive basic necessities are, including healthcare, gas, groceries, and housing. Facts about air and water quality, especially after the elimination of environmental protections and the unleashing of cancer-causing chemicals. Facts about food safety under an administration that pushed out food safety inspectors. Facts about the delays and denials of disaster aid. Facts about an AI industry eager to develop a technology it thinks could take all our jobs and end life on earth.
Oversight is also an exercise of constitutional power. When Congress determines common facts, members can legislate with confidence. If members want to write new ethics laws to check Trump and future presidents, they’ll need to know the true breadth of the president’s corruption. If members want to address high prices and stagnant wages, they’ll need to know more about which companies are ripping people off. If members want to rein in corporate influence in our politics, they’ll need a full account of the effects of unrestrained political spending. Anyone looking to solve the home insurance crisis will have to examine how insurance companies have spiked premiums and kicked people off plans.
The great thing about the processes that establish these common facts, chiefly hearings and investigations, is that members can carry the public along and build momentum for real solutions.
In our forthcoming report, A Congress for the People, we will offer a guide for the 120th Congress to embark on critical fact-finding missions. We recommend five principles to steer committees’ choice of targets and investigations come January 2027. Here’s a snapshot:
- Principle 1: Be aggressive with subpoena power and transparent with responses. Subpoena early and publish what comes back. Parties implicated in this administration’s corruption will likely not cooperate so prepare an enforcement plan.
- Principle 2: Focus on Trumpian corruption that serves elites. Investigate corruption that serves Trump and his elite allies at the public’s expense.
- Principle 3: Police corporate elites. Target the companies that have bankrolled and profited from this administration. Members have a responsibility to make America accountable again.
- Principle 4: Improve media savviness. Take findings to wherever people actually get their news, and call witnesses likely to draw attention.
- Principle 5: Make the victims visible. Put the people who were harmed at the center. Statistics may win debate rounds, but they don’t build mass political power.
The report also names five possible places to start: the DOGE wrecking crew; Russell Vought’s war on the civil service, weaponization of federal funding, and gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the administration’s dismantling of disaster preparedness and its politicized disaster aid; Freedom 250 and the corporate sponsors behind Trump’s hijacking of the Semiquincentennial celebration; and the federal government’s prioritization of AI over people and the planet.
Committees will be spoiled for choice when selecting targets. Our friends at Public Citizen have outlined 56 potential investigations covering a whole host of issues. The Consumer Federation of America has many smart recommendations for a consumer-first oversight agenda. Groundwork Collaborative has identified hundreds of companies and executives ripe for congressional inquiry. There are many repeat offenders so committees should be ready on day one.
Given the sheer volume of potential targets, leadership should give members the room to own an issue, develop expertise, and forge ties with affected communities. Both chambers will also have to expand member and committee staff. Democrats will have to make that a key focus of the upcoming continuing resolution negotiations, then amend rules to make a hiring push possible.
The elections were a thumping, but the job’s far from done. Some will rush to describe the past two years as an aberration, a strange interlude best forgotten. Oversight is how Congress makes sure they can’t memory-hole the most corrupt administration in history. It will also lay the factual foundation for transformative legislation in this coming Congress or the next, especially if Democrats claim the White House in 2028. The clock’s already ticking. Time to give the people what they voted for.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Anti-Corruption and Affordability: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
Three Things Congress Can Do to Fix FEMA
Hinojosa’s History in the Texas State Lege
How BAAJA Would Benefit AI Data Centers, According to the AI Industry And Its Friends
Trump’s disaster aid denials just got harder to track
How Companies Used the Cover of Inflation to Widen Margins
Post-wave Politics by Bill McKibben
After politicizing disaster aid, Team Trump starts keeping relevant data under wraps
Democrats’ new idea for fighting Elon Musk’s influence is a good one
How Corruption Finally Became A Winning Issue For Democrats In The Trump Era