WASHINGTON — Democrats won Congress in a landslide on an “affordability” message responding to voter frustration with persistently high prices under President Donald Trump. Now they have to figure out how to deliver on it — even with Trump still in office.
Their to-do list is long. But figuring out what to prioritize, how far to push for it and what they can actually get with Trump still in the White House won’t be an easy task, and could split the party’s post-election unity.
“We need to end the war of choice in Iran,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters Thursday. “We need to stop the Trump tariffs. We need to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We need to reverse the [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] cuts. We need to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sketched out a similar agenda in a meeting with his colleagues this week; they talked through their plan for the first 100 days of the next Congress.
But there’s a chance — although still a small one — that Schumer won’t be the party’s leader come January. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is challenging Schumer for the majority leader job next year, and is already signaling a tactical break with Schumer.
Van Hollen wants to use a coming expiration of government funding, set for Dec. 11, to demand that Trump end his war in Iran. The move would amount to a replay of Democrats’ gambit in the fall of 2025, when they shut down the government to demand Trump extend health care subsidies. While the subsidies weren’t extended, the party showed fight to its base and Trump’s callous actions during the shutdown — threatening to end food aid, tearing down the East Wing of the White House — damaged his approval rating.
“We should do it now. We shouldn’t say we’re going to wait till January when we have the power to do it on Dec. 11,” Van Hollen said this week on MS NOW.
The top Democratic appropriators — the people who write government funding bills — aren’t on board yet, but they’ve said they’re considering it. A shutdown that extended into the new year could overshadow other parts of the affordability agenda.
Democrats still have major points of agreement, after all. They seem set on following through on campaign promises to undo the SNAP and Medicaid cuts Republicans enacted last year and roll back some of his high-end tax cuts, though it’s unclear whether they will pass individual bills for each item or separate ones. More bills, the thinking goes, would make it more politically damaging for Trump to use his veto pen, as he’s promised to do.
Interviews with a dozen House and Senate Democrats this week also found wide agreement on undoing Trump’s tariffs, which have increased prices for consumer goods, and passing an ethics bill that would ban stock trading not just for members of Congress, but also for the executive branch and for the courts.
Getting any of this into law will almost certainly require cooperation from Trump, which has some Democrats reviving an old dream of Trump agreeing to progressive ideas in hopes of salvaging political wins.
“If President Trump wants the same plaques and portraits and busts as LBJ, we can help make that a reality,” Sen.-elect James Talarico (D-Texas) said on Thursday at the Majority Democrats conference in Denver. “We should make the final two years of his presidency the most productive of any presidency in American history.”
Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.) tried pitching “Medicare For All” to Trump on social media, posting an image of gold “TrumpCare” cards that would let the president claim credit for a policy most famously promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“Donald, this is on the table. Guarantee healthcare for every American, from cradle to grave,” El-Sayed wrote.
It’s not just newcomers fantasizing about a surprise bipartisan turn from Trump, who occasionally negotiated with Democrats in his first term but has largely eschewed such meetings since returning to office.
“There might be the opportunity to be able to do something on immigration, including the Dream Act,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who has served in the Senate since 2009, told HuffPost, describing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. “It’s a very exciting prospect.”
Even Jeffries has recently said immigration “needs to be fixed in a bipartisan way.”
Trump said in 2018 that he would support an immigration deal with a pathway to citizenship, then rejected the idea almost as soon as a bipartisan group of senators presented it to him, partly because of the influence of Stephen Miller, the virulently anti-immigration aide who is now his chief of staff.
“Trump did a 180 from what he promised,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told HuffPost.
Still, some Democrats think it’s important to at least appear to try to be bipartisan.
“I think we first find places where we think we can actually do good for the American public, and maybe that means that we potentially will be working with Donald Trump on bills that could bring down cost of living, increase wages, health care,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told HuffPost. “If we get that going, that’s great. If not, then we start talking about what messaging looks like and messaging bills and setting up for later.”
The messaging scenario seems more likely. Democrats will pass bills that Trump vetoes. Even to do that, however, Democrats will have to figure out what they want. A lot of Democrats have talked about raising the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009, for instance, but the party hasn’t figured out how high they want to raise it. Jeffries declined to say when asked on Thursday.
“That’s a great question, and it’s one of the things that we’re working out between the House and the Senate,” he said.