Incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) posted today: “House Democrats are in the fight to bring government back from the brink of authoritarianism. We will shine a light on President Trump’s quid pro quo, coin-operated, pay-to-play corruption and renew American government as an instrument for the common good.”
Raskin told MS NOW that he intends to subpoena the law firms that struck deals with Trump to learn more about alleged coercion from Trump. He also said he intends to investigate Attorney General Todd Blanche for his refusal to produce documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and for the Department of Justice’s persecution of those Trump considers enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Maggie Goodlander, and Jason Crow.
Raskin also told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that the Judiciary Committee will work with Democratic appropriators to defund Trump’s corrupt prosecutions. “We have the power of the purse,” Raskin told Sargent. “We’ll be working closely with our Appropriations Committee partners to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to cut off money that is being used for political harassment and persecution.”
Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) is in line to chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Yesterday, he told reporters the committee would focus on four major areas. The first is “the Trump crime family.” Garcia noted that a Russian oligarch paid for Don Jr.’s wedding party, the Saudis invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s business, and Eric Trump is on the board of companies that are getting Pentagon contracts. Trump himself has pocketed billions from crypto schemes.
Eamon Javers of CNBC reported today that “Sen[ator] Ron Wyden’s Finance Committee staff intend to dig into JP Morgan’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, with a particular focus on the conduct of high ranking executives and their handling of the bank’s relationship with the disgraced financier.”
Meanwhile, Trump appears to be acting, as President Abraham Lincoln once said of Major General William S. Rosecrans, “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.” He has remained largely quiet about the election but is continuing to talk about his projects in Washington, D.C. Apparently afraid those projects will now come to a halt, he wanted his triumphal arch approved today so work could start immediately. Tonight his hand-picked commission voted as Trump wanted, agreeing to approve the arch, but just before midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan stopped construction for fourteen days.
Carnage, Part Two (a select sample):
If big leads hold, Republican majority on Texas Supreme Court goes from 9-0 to 5-4. 15th appeals court – opened in 2024 for appeals involving the state and business court – will go from all-GOP to all-Democrat. Seven incumbents facing defeat are Gov. Abbott appointees. (Hmmm, does that mean that Elon will come back to Delaware, hat-in-hand?)
Georgia Democrats have swept the statewide races. They won the Senate. They won governor. They won secretary of state. They won attorney general. They won labor commissioner. They won school superintendent. They won the public service commission. They also won the state House. All flips, except the U.S. Senate race.BREAKING: Democrats just FLIPPED the Wisconsin Assembly AND Senate blue! After picking up 14 seats in the legislature in 2024, we set out to flip these chambers this cycle. Thanks to fairer maps & voters making their voices heard in favor of new Dem leadership, we got it done.Flipped red to blue: NH House and Senate NC House (!); WI Senate. Broken GOP Supermajorities: SC House; FL House; IN House; and defeated the Speaker IA House, MO House, and Senate, OH House, KS House.
Last year, with the midterms fast approaching, some Texas Democrats began talking about putting together a “super ticket,” a dream team of battle-tested franchise players who could raise big money and drive turnout across strategic demographic groups.
They wanted the Avengers. They got Miracle on Ice.
But just like Team USA facing the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics, the ragtag group of scrappy underdogs the Democrats put together ended up pulling off the impossible, beating seemingly insurmountable odds to win not just one major contest, but every statewide seat.
A group of little-known state legislators and one millennial farmer unseated longtime GOP powerbrokers and their wealthy backers, reversing the state’s entire political power structure in one night.
At the top of the ticket, Austin state Rep. James Talarico managed to haul in record-setting amounts of money for the U.S. Senate race and build a national brand through his social media presence. His colleague, Austin state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, saw fundraising and attention surge in the home stretch of her challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott.
But the rest of the ticket struggled to build the branding and get the funding needed to break through in a state the size of a small country. Less than a month before the election, about half of likely voters did not know enough to have an opinion on the Democratic nominees for lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller and railroad commissioner, according to the Texas Politics Project.
All of them will assume office come January.
These candidates benefited from a blue wave that routed Republicans across the country, and specific factors in each race tilted the scales in their favor. But for the first time in a long time, Texas Democrats had also “built the sails to catch the wind when it comes,” Katherine Fischer, the executive director of the Texas Majority PAC, a Democratic group, said Wednesday.
Democrats ran someone in every seat, creating a “reverse coattail” effect to get the word out about the whole ticket, even in districts where local candidates were sure to get walloped. They made significant investments in voter turnout, especially in purple counties. And they went all in behind the ticket they had, even if it was not the star-studded list they’d originally imagined.
The worst part of the election – Schumer and Jeffries. They are not ready or able to oversee the changes that need to be done