By: Orion Donovan Smith
After winning majorities in the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Democrats will take control of both chambers when a new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.
That control will let Democrats set the legislative agenda in committees and on the House and Senate floor, but they will still need to decide what to prioritize – and before that, they’ll have to choose their leaders. In interviews Wednesday, Washington Democrats identified a range of priorities for the new majorities to tackle.
“Voters across the country, in red states and blue, sent a really strong message that they want Congress to get costs down and they want to put a stop to this rampant corruption,” said Sen. Patty Murray. “And it is now our job to fight to do both of those.”
Rep. Adam Smith of Bellevue, who is in line to lead the House Armed Services Committee, also identified tackling corruption and the cost of living as the mandate voters have given Democrats. But the congressman, who won a 10th term Tuesday, said he would vote to impeach President Donald Trump because he believes voters sent the message that “we have an absolute psychopath running the country.”
“Look, I understand that people don’t want us to be in an endless partisan fight,” Smith said. “But if Trump’s still president, how do we move forward our agenda? How do we make progress on any of these issues we’re talking about?”
Rep. Marilyn Strickland of Tacoma, who represents Joint Base Lewis-McChord and also sits on the Armed Services Committee, said she would vote to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom she considers especially dangerous, but she doesn’t want “impeachment to turn into a media circus that will take away from the serious work that we have to do to deliver for the American people.”
“Can we walk and chew gum? Absolutely,” she said. “But for me, we have two years to demonstrate that when Democrats are in charge, we can materially improve the quality of life for the American people, and that needs to be our primary focus: lowering costs, ending corruption, ending the cruelty and just getting us back on track as a nation.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell, who will again lead the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said her top priority is passing legislation to lower healthcare costs, rein in Trump’s use of tariffs and end the Iran war.
“We have people suffering over the fact they don’t have health insurance. We have rural county hospitals that are going to go under,” she said. “We’re just eroding our healthcare delivery system, and we’ve got to get that done. And so, to me, that’s what I do first.”
Cantwell said the first order of business on her committee will be renewing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which passed with bipartisan support in 2021 but expired in September.
“In my mind, that’s a layup. It’s nonpartisan, really, saying you want to invest in infrastructure and get it done,” Cantwell said, adding that there may be a chance for her committee to craft artificial intelligence legislation, but not if Trump sticks to his “crazy” position that Congress shouldn’t regulate AI companies at all.
Rep. Kim Schrier, a pediatrician whose district stretches from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose broad jurisdiction includes healthcare, tech companies and artificial intelligence. She said the Democratic landslide on Tuesday energized her to get to work, but she doesn’t expect any quick fixes.
“We’re going to get to work doing what we promised: bringing down costs, taking on corruption, making sure people have healthcare that they can afford, and cracking down and regulating AI and social media for the damage that they are already doing,” Schrier said. “We’ve got a long list of things to fix, and it starts now, but it’s going to take many years, I think, to really get this country back in the right direction.”
Murray said she wouldn’t prejudge a hypothetical impeachment trial, noting that the process begins in the House, but she said Democrats must balance addressing the rising cost of living and what she described as corruption that has made that problem worse. As the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, she will essentially control all federal spending.
“As chair of the Appropriations Committee, I consider those dual responsibilities, that we have to make sure that we look for any corruption within our appropriations bills,” she said. “The power of the purse works when it is paired with strong oversight, and we can’t allocate people’s taxpayer dollars unless we know where it is being spent and put a stop to where it should not be being spent.”
Once their jubilation settles down, Democrats will need to choose leaders for their party in the House and Senate. Current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of New York, are the presumptive front-runners, but some of the newly elected Democratic senators have said they wouldn’t vote for Schumer to become majority leader.
“I think that we’ll see who’s ready for this discussion in the caucus, or what everybody thinks,” Cantwell said of support for Schumer, speaking by phone from Mississippi, where she had been helping Democrat Scott Colom, a candidate Schumer recruited. “I’ll certainly listen to the debate, but you’ve got to give him points for this big victory.”
Like Cantwell, Murray didn’t directly say she would vote for Schumer to remain the leader, leaving that decision to private meetings Senate Democrats will hold when they convene in January.
“Look, we just won the Senate, and we won it in states like Kansas and Texas and South Carolina,” Murray said. “The caucus has a number of new members. We are going to meet and discuss this and make a decision as a whole, and I’m not going to litigate that in the press.”
The election results also raise tough questions for Republicans, who have been led by Trump for a decade. It remains to be seen how much GOP lawmakers distance themselves from the president, who is deeply unpopular with the American public at large but still enjoys the loyalty of the Republican base.
Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican whose race against Democrat Carmela Conroy remained too close to call Wednesday night, declined to say what lesson he takes from the election results, but he said the GOP “needs to be a party of ideas and institutions, and not a party of personalities.”
“He’s now been the primary political actor for more than 10 years, and that’s a long time to be at the center of attention,” he said of Trump, adding that the Republican Party should focus on the “core values of limited government and fiscal responsibility and stronger, safer communities, and stronger national security.”
“I don’t believe in those things because I’m a Republican,” Baumgartner said. “I believe those things, and that’s why I’m a Republican.”
Baumgartner, a freshman lawmaker who has taken a leading role in a bipartisan push to reform college sports, said he had been hopeful about working with Cantwell to pass a House version of her Protect College Sports Act, which passed the Senate in September.
“I think that’s going to be a lot less likely because of the results last night,” he said, acknowledging that the new Democratic majority may use its newfound leverage to revise the bill, led in the Senate by Cantwell and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
In addition to helping victims of the wildfires that devastated Spokane and other parts of his Eastern Washington district over the summer, Baumgartner said his other top priority after the election is passing a defense budget that meets the needs of the Iran war and other challenges the U.S. government faces around the world.
“We just have so many global threats from radical Islamic terrorists, and both North Korea and China growing their nuclear arsenals, and emboldened jihadists in Iran, and with this age of drone warfare and those sorts of things,” he said. “The country really needs to do an updated defense budget with some real paradigm shifts just to meet those threats. I think that will also get more complicated.”
As he has argued consistently since the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched the war in February, Baumgartner said Trump and his administration should be “focused on explaining to the American people the threat” Iran poses, “but we’ll have to get some help from the Democrats on it.”
Democrats seem unlikely to help Trump and GOP hawks make the case for the war. Smith, the Armed Services Committee chairman, has taken multiple overseas trips with Baumgartner but disagrees with the Spokane Republican about the merits of the operation.
“He’s implementing meaningful policies without much thought behind them,” Smith said of Trump’s past two years in office. “The war in Iran, the immigration crackdown, the tariffs. The mad king has gone completely out of control. He’s mean. He’s nasty. He’s crazy. My God, we have to put a stop to this. And every single Republican candidate out there had at one time or another signed up for that.”