Are Members of Congress Pushing Back against President Trump?
Part I: What Congressional Democrats are doing
Since Donald Trump began – and apparently never ended – his “one day” of acting as a dictatorial president, many have complained that Congress has done nothing to check his broad assertions of unilateral power.
Legislative deference to the executive branch is itself nothing new; Congress has been surrendering its authority to the president for many decades, a process well documented by scholars such as John Dearborn, Andrew Rudalevige, and Louis Fisher. And in today’s political environment, congressional Republicans face strong incentives to stay mum while Trump acts as if he embodies all three branches of government
But while Congress has been far more supine than the Founding Fathers intended, lawmakers of both parties have been doing some things to counter the president, arguably with some success. In this post I will focus on the recent actions of congressional Democrats (against both Trump and Republicans in Congress); in a future post I will discuss congressional Republicans.
Ways to Overcome Being in the “Deep Minority”
The Democratic Party has every reason to stand up against the president, but it faces a major obstacle: it is in the “deep minority,” out of the White House and lacking majorities in the House and Senate. This significantly limits its formal powers.
That does not mean the Party is without any influence, however. As I wrote in my book Underdog Politics, there are things that a minority party can do – if not to constrain the president directly, then at least to erode his public support, make it harder for him and his co-partisans to achieve their objectives in Congress, build morale and unity within their own ranks, and win congressional seats in the next election. And congressional Democrats are starting to use some of these tactics.
For example, while it’s still early to judge, it appears that the minority party has been having some success at electioneering, i.e. raising campaign funds, recruiting strong candidates, and otherwise working to win enough seats in 2026 to make at least one chamber a center of institutional resistance against the White House. Republicans are raising a lot of money, but Democrats are not far behind, and Jacob Smith recently noted that a large number of quality Democratic candidates are emerging to challenge GOP House incumbents.1
Another set of minority party tactics that are more visible and sometimes have more immediate effects involve messaging: acts in the public sphere designed to convey a message or position on a particular issue. Among the innovative messaging tactics used by congressional Democrats against Trump and the GOP so far this year:
Holding public events in districts where the Republican incumbent refuses to hold townhall meetings, helping convey the impression that GOP lawmakers fear their own constituents.
A public speaking tour by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that garnered national attention.
Senator Cory Booker’s floor speech centered on abuses of the Trump White House that got headlines for breaking the Senate’s record in length (previously set by then-segregationist Strom Thurmond).
The trip by Senator Chris Van Hollen to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who is being held in an El Salvador prison – a trip that was substantively important (to check on Garcia’s well-being) but that also put a spotlight on Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement activities.
A sit-in in front of the U.S. Capitol attended by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Booker, and other lawmakers.
Democrats have also been delivering a record number of speeches in the House that attack Trump. One way to measure this is the number of times that Democratic lawmakers have been called out by the presiding officer for “engaging in personalities” when discussing the president, which is a violation of House rules.2
The figure below shows the frequency of these rule violations in the first four months of odd-numbered years since 2017. As can be seen, Democrats exceeded the number of such admonishments that they received during the first Trump presidency – not to mention the number issued against Republicans for criticizing President Biden in 2021 and 2023.
None of this messaging should be dismissed as empty rhetoric. It may be contributing to Trump’s plummeting public approval ratings, but even if it isn’t, it has almost certainly helped galvanize Democratic voters, inspire future resistance by lawmakers, and give the minority party a sense of direction and purpose that it will need for future legislative battles.
Why Not More Obstruction?
Obstruction is another method available to the minority party in both chambers to push back against the governing party. Interestingly, however, Democrats seem to be shying away from using dilatory tactics. For example, there have been few motions to rise or adjourn – non-debatable motions which force the House to stop what it is doing and hold a recorded vote – even though House Democrats employed them quite often, with some success, in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.3
There may be good reasons for this. As Bluesky’s Process Party pointed out, if dilatory tactics are overused in the House, the Speaker can ignore them,4 and the majority party may even revise the chamber’s rules to prohibit them altogether. Similarly, Senate Democrats may fear that Republicans will respond to an increase in filibustering by permanently limiting the filibuster’s use, as they did in 2017.
Obstructing the majority can also backfire if it leads to an unpopular or undesired outcome. This was the rationale given by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer when he backed off from a threat to deny the 60 votes needed to pass a funding bill in March. Schumer avoided a government shutdown and the possibility that Trump would exploit the shutdown to eliminate federal programs, though doing so also gave the president a political win and infuriated many Democrats.
Nonetheless, Democratic Senators are doing some things to slow down their chamber, as noted by Jonathan Bernstein and others. One notable way that Senate Democrats have made things harder for the GOP is to require recorded votes on Trump’s nominees (rather than approve them by voice vote), which delays proceedings somewhat, and then making those votes relatively close.
As the chart below shows, between January and April of this year, not one of the president’s civilian nominees was approved by voice vote, and just over half of them were confirmed with fewer than 55 votes. This compelled Senate Republicans to stay unified and publicly back some highly controversial nominees, which might come back to haunt them. By contrast, nearly three-quarters of Obama’s 2017 nominees over the same four month period were approved by voice vote, and none of those requiring a recorded vote were approved by fewer than 55 Senators.5
Democrats are showing that they aren’t powerless
One could make the case that Democrats should doing more with the (albeit few) formal powers they have. Some have argued, for example, that they must be more obstructionist or even force a vote on impeachment against Trump. (For a good discussion of the politics of impeachment, see the latest podcast by Seth Masket and John Hagner.)
But it would be incorrect to claim that congressional Democrats have been inactive. In fact, given their deep minority status and the unprecedented exertion of power by the president, the amount of media coverage they have gotten from their messaging efforts has been impressive, as has been their fundraising and candidate recruitment and their ability to make Senate Republicans use up floor time to cast tough nomination votes.
Furthermore, it’s worth remembering that Trump – who has only been president for four months, believe it or not – faces a host of political and policy challenges ranging from unpopular tariffs to the passage of a massive reconciliation bill, which give Democrats more opportunities to exploit.
In the meantime, what probably matters most is that Democrats follow the tried-and-true path of minority parties and keep looking for innovative ways to make life difficult for their political opponents. As one minority party House member told me back in 2011, “You never know where the sensitive point is going to be on the other side, so you keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing.”
It also appears that strong Republican candidates are choosing not to run for Congress in 2024, which further helps Democrats’ electioneering efforts.
H/t to Ringwiss for mentioning this phenomenon in a Bluesky post.
Congressional staffers recently circulated a memo urging lawmakers to use these and other delaying tactics, but House Democrats appear to be unpersuaded so far.
See Rule XVI, cl. 1 of House Rules.
Obama had a much larger same-party majority in the Senate than Trump does, but even so, the majority of Obama’s nominees who were subject to recorded votes were confirmed by more than 70 votes — meaning they received at least some Republican support.