The House and Senate are out, but the Capitol was buzzing last week as lawmakers returned to town and next year’s newcomers joined the festivities.
There was a flurry of activity last week, with President-elect Donald Trump filling out his Cabinet and advisers list, House and Senate members picking up new assignments, and new members getting a lay of the land.
The Washington Examiner’s team of congressional reporters fanned out and caught up either with returning lawmakers rushing through efforts to approve President Joe Biden’s last wave of judicial appointments or new faces trying to find their way through the labyrinthine halls on their way to the proper bathroom.
So, readers aren’t as lost as new members in the churn of an outgoing administration and a new Congress. This Thanksgiving week, we are looking at who the new lawmakers are and what’s in store for them. In our first installment, Associate Editor Hailey Bullis chased down a handful of freshman representatives who might not be familiar with how Washington works but are excited to get started, even if their introduction to government is set to be rockier than they might have hoped.
“The 118th Congress was ridiculed by Republicans and Democrats alike for being chaotic, with the session only passing 34 bills in its first year,” Hailey reminded us, and the coming session might only be slightly more productive.
House Republicans maintained their majority and now have the incentive, and help of a friendly White House and Senate, though it’s not clear they are completely prepared to set aside their squabbles to do the hard work of legislating.
Rep.-elect Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) is going to try to change that attitude.
“I’ve always been a person to roll up my sleeves and do things myself,” Bresnahan, who is the CEO and president of his family’s construction company, Kuharchik Construction, told the Washington Examiner.
Bresnahan is brand new to politics and, like Trump eight years ago, could bring a fresh eye to problems plaguing Washington, as well as a clean scorecard that hasn’t been filled up with grudges and grievances.
Democrats and Republicans in the House have long lists of grievances, though not everyone is trying to keep the intra and interparty fights running.
Rep.-elect Pat Harrigan (R-NC) told our team he thinks Republicans have moved past their nasty speaker fights, are ready to unite behind Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) again, and are “on the same page” moving forward.
New Democrats know they’re walking into the minority and have started laying the groundwork to work across the aisle and operate out of a position of weakness.
“My whole legislative service has been in the minority party, and it’s about — you have to work hard. You have to work harder,” said Rep.-elect Julie Johnson (D-TX), the first LGBT candidate to hold a congressional office in Texas. “You have to really build relationships and really fine-tune the policy positions that you want to try to move in the process and find Republican allies, and I’m already working on that.”
Click here to read more about the new faces and names to keep an eye on in Washington.
Resistance training
Vice President Kamala Harris is reportedly still in the fight, though she’s been licking her wounds in Hawaii for weeks as she recovers from her bruising loss to Trump.
Democrats broadly have struggled to dip into their reserves and find the same drive to resist Trump now that they know he is headed back to the White House. To add insult to injury, he’s returning in a fashion in which a Republican hasn’t arrived in two decades, riding a slim but undeniable popular vote victory.
With Biden fading into the background despite remaining in control of the country and Harris decamping to Hawaii, Democrats are scuffling. Leaders are torn about how or whether to change anything moving forward, and when some officials speak up or reach out to do something, they are more often than not shouted down.
National Correspondent Mabinty Quarshie talked with several Democrats about the feeling of despondency and their assessment of whether they can break out of the blues or if they are going to tread water until the first Trump misstep reminds them what their 2016-era resistance felt like.
“I do plan on working to ensure Democrats are heard, but honestly, I’m still too despondent at the moment and have unsubscribed to almost every source of news,” Kassel Coover, a Pennsylvania Democrat who volunteered for Harris’s campaign, told Mabinty.
That “shell-shocked” feeling, as Democratic strategist Brad Bannon explained it to Mabinty, isn’t running all the way through the party, and it’s helping put things into perspective.
“I don’t feel like [there’s] no energy,” Sharonda Huffman, a Democratic National Committee delegate from Baltimore County, Maryland, told Mabinty. “It has to be a little bit more strategic. And some people just need a break. And sometimes, it’s probably best to regroup and rethink.”
There are vestiges of the “Resistance” movement that are left over and getting warmed up again. The Women’s March, which once turned out more than 500,000 people clad in pink caps carrying signs and chanting slogans of resistance, is happening again, though it’s expected to be a diminished affair.
Some fundraisers are suggesting activists’ time and money would be better spent by simply sending cash to organizations set up to resist the Trump administration and skip the gathering all together.
Part of the problem for Democrats might not be a sense of futility but exhaustion. Nearly a decade of efforts pushing back on Trump and his message didn’t result in ousting him from public life, and he hasn’t changed his position on most issues.
His nominees for the new Cabinet, however, have lit a fire under some skeptics who are anxious to keep the likes of Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth and Democrat-turned-independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. away from the levers of power.
And governors in blue states are building alliances designed to thwart any attempt by Trump to get his administration entangled in state affairs.
Bannon told Mabinty the “outrage is building” as Democrats sit on the sidelines and watch Trump prepare for his return.
But that frustration has been pushed to the sidelines. Democrats are out of power in Washington, and there’s little their outrage can do as long as they are busy fighting with themselves about what their next steps should be — including whether they should try to keep the resistance alive or whether to accept it’s Trump’s world and they’re just living in it for the next four years.
Click here to read more about Democrats’ depression.
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For your radar
Biden will pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey at 11 a.m. (You can read more about the history of that event here.) Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Staten Island for a Friendsgiving event at 6:15 p.m. in which they will serve food and deliver remarks before returning to the White House.
White House deputy spokesman Andrew Bates will gaggle with reporters on Air Force One.
Harris is making her way home from Hawaii, leaving Kalaoa at 10:30 a.m. local time and arriving in San Francisco at 5:10 p.m. Pacific time.
