Defeated Congressional Republicans have already stopped coming to work…
It’s just a sign of what’s coming to Trump and Congress with the Democrats having a incoming US House majority and Nancy pelosi as Speaker with the political steering wheel ….
2018 will go in the books as a bad one for most Republicans. They picked up two seats in the Senate, but lost 40 in the House. Their numbers among women in the House shrank from 23 to 13, and President Donald Trump can’t give away his chief of staff job.
Ask anyone who’s been there: The only thing worse than losing the majority in Congress is every day after that, when chairing committees and holding press conferences is replaced by packing boxes and saying goodbye to staff.
It’s gotten so bad for some of the 40 House members who lost in November that they’ve stopped showing up for votes at all. But the real drudgery belongs to the Republicans who won. If 2018 seems bad, here are five ways that 2019 is going to be even worse:
1. Democratic oversight. There’s a new sheriff in town, or more specifically, there will be many new sheriffs in town once Democrats take over all the standing committees of the House in January, not to mention any select or special committees they’ll have the power to create in the future.
Already, press coverage of incoming Democratic chairs Rep. Elijah Cummings at Oversight and Government Reform, Jerry Nadler at Judiciary, and Adam Schiff at Intelligence reads like a primer on the horsemen of the apocalypse, and with good reason. After two years of House committees mostly cheerleading for the Trump administration instead of overseeing it, Democrats are poised to issue subpoenas on everything from the president’s possible violation of the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections to the administration’s child separation policy at the southern border.
Investigations will also fire up into possible abuses by recently or not-so-recently departed Trump cabinet secretaries. (Think outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his robust travel schedule or former HHS Secretary Tom Price’s eyebrow-raising stock trades or Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s staffing costs.)
If Hillary Clinton was good enough for Republicans to go after as recently as a week ago, very little will be too old or off-limits for Democrats and their focus on the Trump administration.
2. A Democratic house agenda. After two years of controlling both Houses of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to adjust to reacting to Democratic priorities in the House instead of ignoring them.
Look for likely Speaker Nancy Pelosi to move quickly and strategically on health care costs, infrastructure spending, government ethics and gun safety. Not only are they all issues on which midterm voters overwhelmingly supported Democrats, they are also areas where Trump is on the record saying he wants to make progress, but Senate Republicans have done the opposite.
That dynamic could leave Republicans feuding, the public frustrated, and Democrats with a powerful argument for voters to send more members of their party to Washington in 2020 to get the job done….