Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed.CreditSarah Silbiger/The New York Times
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Nov. 11, 2018
WASHINGTON — Two days after midterm congressional elections that handed them control of the House, triumphant Democrats dialed in to their first conference call since winning the majority to strategize on the way forward.
But the call that Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, convened on Thursday with Democratic lawmakers and their newly elected colleagues was not a planning session on how to protect health care coverage or lower prescription drug prices, thematic pillars of the party’s successful campaigns. It was a briefing about President Trump’s latest remarkable move — his decision, hours after the last polls closed, to fire the attorney general — and a discussion of how Democrats would address the cascade of potentially grave constitutional consequences that could follow.
The strategy session highlighted the central challenge that Democrats face as they prepare to assume control of the House in a new era of divided government that begins in January. Democrats, who remained remarkably focused during their campaigns, must now figure out how to put forward their own agenda — one Ms. Pelosi says will be focused on lowering drug costs, rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges, and cleaning up government corruption — even as they deal with the provocations of a president who relishes confrontation and disdains institutional norms.
“Trump’s great genius is to try and reduce everyone to his level and approach, and he wants to be able to paint Democrats as single-mindedly bent on his destruction,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to Barack Obama. “These Democrats didn’t get elected, by and large, to war with Trump. They got elected to try and get some positive things done on issues like health care and economic issues for their constituents, and the notion that on Day 1 they should spend all their energy trying to bedevil him is wrong. Striking the balance is going to be difficult.”
Ms. Pelosi, who expects to reclaim her post as speaker in the new Congress, has encouraged fellow Democrats in private meetings to resist the urge to leap at Mr. Trump’s every utterance and misdeed — “I don’t think we’ll have any scattershot freelancing,” she told reporters last week — lest they lose focus and play into his hands.
At the same time, there is a giant pent-up appetite among Democrats to hold Mr. Trump and his administration accountable in ways that Republicans have refused to over the last two years.
The dynamic was on display on Sunday, as top Democrats fanned out to the morning television news programs to talk extensively about the avenues they intended to pursue to investigate Mr. Trump and check his power. There was little talk of a proactive policy agenda as Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press”that Matthew Whitaker, who is acting as attorney general after the removal of Jeff Sessions, must have no role in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, said he would subpoena Mr. Whitaker if necessary, making him the committee’s first witness after the new Congress convenes in January. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who will assume the helm of the Oversight and Government Reform panel, said that while he was “not going to be handing out subpoenas like somebody’s handing out candy on Halloween,” he planned to delve into a number of subjects, including the administration’s handling of the health care law and its addition of a citizenship question to the census.
Striking the right balance is a political imperative for Democrats, who owe their majority to a new, younger and more diverse crop of members-elect — about half of them women — many of whom won races in centrist or Republican-leaning areas after campaigning as change agents.
Ms. Pelosi and other top Democrats toiled during the campaign to stay wedded to a carefully honed, poll-tested agenda that would be broadly popular, calling, for example, for protecting the Affordable Care Act rather than promising to replace it with a single-payer health coverage plan. Democrats talked about a broad, bipartisan infrastructure plan of the sort that Mr. Trump campaigned on.
They have also promised to restore checks and balances to a presidency that has gone unchecked under two years of all-Republican rule on Capitol Hill, and are eyeing investigations of the administration’s environmental policies, its undercutting of the health care law, and its family separation policy, to name just a few. And they face consequential decisions about whether to engage in a potentially fierce legal battle over Mr. Trump’s tax returns and, ultimately, about whether to impeach him.