In January, as Donald Trump was beginning his glide path to the Republican nomination, House Democrats released a report claiming the leader of “America First” had received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments. Most of the money had come from China, a country Trump routinely promises “to go harder on.” Later that spring, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) estimated that if you included the 69 foreign trademarks Trump businesses were granted, the actual amount of his haul was closer to $160 million.
These findings came out as House Republicans used their committee majorities and subpoena powers to drive news cycles with bogus investigations into the “Biden Crime Family.” House Democrats and outside groups like CREW lacked these agenda-setting abilities. But Senate Democrats did not. What did they do with these powers? Absolutely nothing.
It would be too kind to say Senate Democrats brought a knife to a gunfight. They brought a calculator to a potential civil war.
Which fits a pattern during the Trump years. While House Republicans were pushing fraudulent conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner’s blockbuster $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia was barely noticed in the Senate until Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., launched an inquiry in June. While the House GOP used hearings to push the latest talking points out of Mar-A-Lago, Senate Democrats studiously held hearings with AI “insiders” that neither deserved nor received widespread attention. While every effort was made to embarrass and humiliate President Joe Biden and his family in the House, no Senate hearings were held into the Trump administration’s violation of the emoluments clause, the Hatch Act, obstruction of justice, fraud, cronyism or bigotry, to say nothing about further hearings into Jan. 6 or the classified documents case.
It would be too kind to say Senate Democrats brought a knife to a gunfight. They brought a calculator to a potential civil war.
It’s not like all Democrats are incapable using their subpoena power to drive a crucial message to voters in an election year. That’s exactly what the House Democrats did in 2022 with the work of the House select committee on Jan. 6. It’s true that most House Republicans boycotted the panel after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to include GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, both of whom backed Trump’s election subversion. But the committee’s hearings changed the national conversation about Jan. 6 and placed the danger of the MAGA movement in front of voters before the midterms. This in turn helped to avoid a “red wave” at the ballot box.
Perhaps Senate hearings wouldn’t have made a similar difference this year. But we’ll never know, since they were never tried. Senate Democrats — many of whom have also gone to great lengths to protect the filibuster and emphasize bipartisanship — seemingly had no appetite for a committee that likely would have meant eschewing congressional norms. The problem is that Trump doesn’t care about norms, and if he is elected again neither will Senate Republicans. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the outgoing GOP leader, has already dispensed with traditions to achieve Republican political ends, and his successor as Senate GOP leader is likely to be more radical.
This discrepancy speaks to how differently Republicans and Democrats view their jobs. The Democratic strategy is to win elections by making themselves as popular as possible. This often entails passing progressive legislation. Republicans see their job as primarily making the other side as unpopular as possible, with delivering for the American people an afterthought.
You can worry about making democracy work after you save it.
Neither side can claim their strategy is 100% politically successful: From 2017 to this January, Republicans and Democrats will have held the White House, Senate and House for four years each. Only one side, though, can credibly claim their efforts bettered the country in the long term.
But any bills that Senate Democrats passed this year weren’t getting through the Republican House anyway (even the bipartisan border bill, largely a Republican wish list, was blocked). With that in mind, trying to win some news cycles with hearings on how much money the man who wants to ban Muslims makes from Saudi Arabia would have been a better use of Democrats’ time. You can worry about making democracy work after you save it.
CORRECTION (Oct. 16, 2024, 7:45 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated when Sen. Ron Wyden’s investigation of Jared Kushner’s firm began. The investigation began in June, not in the fall.
