Congress

Capitol agenda: Shutdown fight coming sooner than you think

Published

1 hour ago

November 6, 2026

Democrats have a chance before they take power in January to undercut President Donald Trump’s Iran war checkbook. Not everyone is on board.

Lawmakers will have to pass another funding bill by mid-December to avoid a government shutdown. Though Republicans maintain their majorities until the end of the year, some Democrats — ready to flex their new influence after a midterm blowout — want any year-end spending measure to block cash for the military conflict.

But the move could spark a shutdown fight that extends into the next year and overshadows their new majority and other policy goals.

Democrats will have to weigh the pros and cons of instigating a confrontation they won’t necessarily win.

The top Democratic appropriators, at least, didn’t appear to rule out a fight.

“Democrats will absolutely not fund Trump’s war of choice with Iran that has increased costs on American families and made us less safe,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro said Thursday in a statement to Blue Light News.

Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray, in a statement, also attributed Democrats’ midterm gains to the unpopularity of the Iran conflict: “The American people just voted overwhelmingly to put an end to this war, and we are going to look at every tool we have available to us to bring this disastrous war to an end.”

The top Democrats in both chambers — Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — have yet to announce whether they will try to use the moment to limit resources for the war.

Jeffries said in a statement that Democrats will have “a leadership conversation” with DeLauro about the war, “but it is clear from this election that the American people are demanding accountability and an end to the war.”

Schumer said in an interview Thursday he’s working with Murray “to get something done” on government funding before the shutdown deadline, but didn’t forecast whether he’d demand a cutoff of dollars.

The party has been consistent for months in its opposition to the Iran conflict and has so far fought off Trump’s requests for a $1.5 trillion military budget and an emergency war funding package.

Still, triggering a shutdown isn’t a risk all Democrats want to take.

“I don’t know where our leadership is on this one, but I would say that definitely there’s got to be a way to wind this down instead of saying, ‘no funding,’” a House Democratic appropriator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said in an interview.

What else we’re watching:

— BLACK DEMOCRATS WANT SOUTHERN INVESTMENT: Black lawmakers are urging national Democrats to invest in the South after a string of stunning wins were powered by a surge in Black voters. Many of these lawmakers, who have previously chided donors for not investing earlier in promising candidates, like Scott Colom in Mississippi and Angie Nixon in Florida, are actively seeking commitments for future cycles. “You cannot reap for which you don’t sow,” said Rep. Troy Carter, who is poised to chair the Congressional Black Caucus next year. Across House races Tuesday, turnout in counties that are at least 60% Black surged 21 points compared to the last midterm in 2022, according to a Blue Light News analysis of preliminary returns. That’s more than double the increase in votes cast nationally in counties where the population is less than 20% Black.

— JEFFRIES KNOCKS PERMITTING DEAL — Jeffries Thursday said the Senate permitting deal “falls short” and raised concerns about the bill’s proposed changes to bedrock environmental laws and protections for tribal sovereignty. “We must once again support the clean energy economy and combat the climate crisis with the fierce urgency of now,” a spokesperson for Jeffries told Blue Light News exclusively. “However, the current Senate bill under consideration falls short in several areas, including the manner in which [National Environmental Policy Act] reform is undertaken and the failure to adequately protect tribal sovereignty.” Jeffries’ criticism complicates the bill’s path to passage during the lame-duck session, with a Senate procedural vote on the package scheduled for Monday.

Jennifer Scholtes, Riley Rogerson and Nico Portuondo contributed to this report.

Congress

Democrats’ biggest legal battle against Trump has already started

Published

1 hour ago

November 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The day after a federal judge ordered the Kennedy Center board to remove President Donald Trump’s name from the building, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s phone started blowing up.

Matt Floca, the center’s operator, sent 11 straight texts to Lutnick, Trump’s go-between on one of his second-term obsessions: a gilded redesign of the performing arts center. The conversation ballooned into a three-month-long, 180-message exchange between the two men that is now at the heart of a legal battle over the Kennedy Center’s future — and a prelude to what will likely be a defining legal and political fight over the next two years.

When preservation groups suing over the Kennedy Center demanded to see more details about what Lutnick and Floca had discussed, White House lawyers intervened, invoking executive privilege because the messages, they said, “reflect advice from the president” or the deliberations of his close advisers. Now a judge must decide whether to pierce Trump’s demand for secrecy in order to decide the Kennedy Center’s fate.

Trump has already tested the bounds of executive privilege, and is all but certain to push the envelope even further as he tries to fend off congressional Democrats’ aggressive oversight agenda for the next two years. How the courts resolve those disputes will shape the future of the Kennedy Center, the future of Trump’s second term and even the future of the presidency.

“They could really damage some of their institutional sort of positions that they might want to use against Congress if they try to litigate them,” said Jonathan Shaub, a member of the White House Counsel’s office under President Joe Biden and author of a forthcoming book on executive privilege. “They’ve got to do some real thinking. … It doesn’t seem like there has been that kind of larger strategic thinking yet.”

Executive privilege isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has clearly established that presidents’ private discussions with advisers must be able to stay secret — unless other weighty interests justify overriding that confidentiality. It’s most commonly invoked in matters of national security or foreign affairs, where courts are especially reluctant to encroach on the president’s need for private discussions and advice.

But Trump’s decision to take a direct role in the redesign of the Kennedy Center, as well as a Washington, D.C. golf course, are stretching the boundaries of presidential secrecy in new ways. The Justice Department has floated the prospect of executive privilege assertions in cases challenging Trump’s effort to punish law firms, authorize military strikes on alleged drug boats and penalize the BBC for a piece about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He tried unsuccessfully to assert it while he was out of office, to ward off Congress’ Jan. 6 investigation.

And legal battles over executive privilege are poised to explode next year, when a Democratic Congress pursues investigations into Trump, along with his appointees, family members and allies. Democrats are mindful that Trump wielded privilege effectively in his first term, stymying their most far-reaching probes for years.

That history is coloring their thinking as they prepare an onslaught of subpoenas to unearth the details of Trump’s most controversial second-term decisions. House Democrats are already discussing an investigative battle plan that factors in Trump’s tendency to stonewall, according to one person with knowledge of the conversations, granted anonymity to share private discussions. Democrats will have to start the process quickly if they have any chance of winning a dragged-out privilege fight

“The House must have the ability to prevail when the law and facts are on its side and overcome what are likely to be extremely broad invocations of executive privilege,” said Thomas Spulak, who was a top lawyer for the House in the 1990s.

Trump’s proclivity to fight every battle on every front — and his time-honored tactic of running out the clock on his investigators — could force courts, including the Supreme Court, to develop new, permanent rules for executive privilege. And though prior administrations were concerned about protecting the institution of the presidency, Trump has made clear he is willing to push his battles to the limit, even if it results in legal precedents that hamstring his successors.

“If they’re really planning on taking the more extreme stance in litigation and pushing it to the appellate courts, I think there’s a very real chance that they get adverse appellate decisions,” said Shaub, now a law professor at the University of Kentucky.

Some legal experts say the new Democratic majority might be able to work around these protracted legal battles by targeting people and organizations outside the administration who have fewer claims to government secrecy.

“If they’re asking for documents or information from third parties who are private parties, even if the White House asserts executive privilege, I think that it’s going to be an uphill battle, to say the least, for the White House,” said Jessica Roth, a law professor at Yeshiva University.

But the Justice Department appears ready to fight on that front, too. It recently issued guidance suggesting that the president’s conversations with outside advisers are subject to executive privilege and it has asserted that protection in a suit over the president’s attempts to punish law firms that had worked for Democrats or employed lawyers he saw as his enemies.

On Wednesday — a day after Democrats dominated the midterms — four Justice Department attorneys told U.S. District Judge Amir Ali they plan to make broad claims of executive privilege to try to block access to White House records about negotiations with law firms. A longtime Trump confidant and legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, shouldn’t have to give testimony in the case or even detail whether he has an attorney-client relationship with Trump or others in the administration, a DOJ attorney argued.

“We shouldn’t even be putting third parties in a position where they have to respond,” DOJ lawyer Michael Velchik said. “There are separation of powers concerns when plaintiff seeks to depose or see information from individuals that they allege are close advisers to the president.”

DOJ has also argued to Ali that under a 2004 Supreme Court precedent involving Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, the records and testimony the American Bar Association is seeking in the suit should be sought first from the law firms who negotiated with the administration.

Democrats are openly telegraphing their targets for aggressive investigations next year that will seek to peer behind the Oval Office curtain. Lawmakers slated to lead those investigations have foreshadowed reviews of his controversial pardons, his family’s business ventures, his role in the Justice Department’s targeting of his political adversaries, his handling of the Epstein files and a slew of other targets.

The balance between the need for secrecy and the needs of investigators has remained ill-defined ever since the Nixon-era Supreme Court enshrined it as a concept. Congress and criminal investigators have tested it repeatedly, but those skirmishes have rarely resulted in the type of sweeping court rulings that set precedents for future disputes.

Congress

Some Democrats don’t want to wait for January to block Trump’s war in Iran

Published

1 hour ago

November 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats will take control of Congress in January. Their first chance to burn President Donald Trump’s checkbook for the Iran war could come even sooner.

Lawmakers face a Dec. 11 deadline to extend federal funding or spark a government shutdown — just weeks before Republicans lose their majorities in the House and Senate. And after Democratic moderates and progressives alike campaigned successfully on ending the war in Iran, some in the party now say any year-end spending measure must block cash for the military conflict.

Democratic leaders have yet to announce whether they will try to use the moment to limit resources for Trump’s offensive, but the party’s top House appropriator isn’t ruling out a year-end fight.

“Democrats will absolutely not fund Trump’s war of choice with Iran that has increased costs on American families and made us less safe,” Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro said Thursday in a statement to Blue Light News.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — on tap to become speaker next year — said in a statement, “we will have a leadership conversation” with DeLauro “about Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in Iran.”

But, he added, “it is clear from this election that the American people are demanding accountability and an end to the war.”

At least two potential presidential candidates in 2028 are pushing Democrats to play hardball with Republicans, using their influence with the Democratic base.

“I agree that the reason Republicans lost is the Iran war,” Rep. Ro Khanna said on social media Wednesday. He argued that Congress should “end the Iran war like we did for Vietnam,” referring to a 1973 move to cut off funding for military operations in southeast Asia.

The California Democrat, whose allies just launched a “Run Ro” committee to raise money for a potential presidential bid, also called on Democrats to support a stopgap funding patch in December that would bar federal dollars for “any combat activities of the U.S. military in Iran.”

“No capitulating,” said another presumptive presidential contender, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in an interview with The Bulwark this week. He urged Democrats to “stand strong” on blocking Iran war funding, adding that the party was “in a position now where nobody should be afraid anymore” given its “massive majorities” in Congress.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is expected to lead the Democratic majority next year, said in an interview Thursday that he is currently working with Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, “to get something done” on government funding before the shutdown deadline.

Murray, in a statement, also attributed Democrats’ midterm gains to the unpopularity of the Iran conflict: “The American people just voted overwhelmingly to put an end to this war, and we are going to look at every tool we have available to us to bring this disastrous war to an end.”

But Murray and Schumer have not forecast whether Democrats will demand a cutoff of dollars for the Iran war during the upcoming funding negotiations. Schumer did, however, say publicly this week that he sees Congress’ funding power as a means to bring the conflict to an end.

“We are going to end the war,” he pledged during a Wednesday news conference at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “And the founding fathers had the power of the purse as one of the ways of deterring a president who does war without the consent of the American people.”

While some might find it appealing to use the Dec. 11 funding deadline as an immediate leverage point, it raises the odds of a government shutdown that spills into the new year and overshadows the new majority’s other policy goals. Democrats will have to weigh the pros and cons of instigating a confrontation they won’t necessarily win given opposition from the White House and some Republicans still in Congress.

“I don’t know where our leadership is on this one, but I would say that definitely there’s got to be a way to wind this down instead of saying ‘no funding,’” a House Democratic appropriator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said in an interview. “There’s got to be a way to reasonably wind this war down under better conditions.”

Bill Hoagland, a former longtime top Senate Republican budget aide, said in an interview Thursday that Democrats face a “dilemma” over the issue.

“Clearly part of their success the other night was because of their opposition to the war, and the American public’s opposition to the war,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t think Democrats want to be, during the lame duck, accused of creating a shutdown.”

Democrats have been consistent for months in their opposition to the Iran conflict, voting repeatedly on war powers resolutions. They have also fought against Trump’s request for a record-breaking $1.5 trillion military budget, as well as his pleas for an emergency funding package to cover the costs of the war.

But going forward — especially in the House — Democratic leaders have been keen on talking with all of their factions before making any big decisions on legislative strategy, and Jeffries has already reiterated that commitment to collaboration after their midterm blowout. So charting the course for how to handle shutdown negotiations will be up for discussion in coming weeks.

Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview this week Democrats will be in a “stronger negotiating position” next year. While he did not say how his party should navigate the upcoming funding deadline, he did caution Democrats against making legislative compromises with Republicans before the balance of power flips.

“These guys just got told by Republican voters that they shouldn’t be in charge,” Casar said. “We should listen to the voters and not give these corrupt guys much of a say on what happens next.”

Jordain Carney and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

Congress

Chuck Schumer just won a huge majority. He’s already thinking about making it bigger.

Published

12 hours ago

November 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats could pick up a once-unthinkable nine Senate seats by the time votes are fully counted from Tuesday’s midterms. Chuck Schumer says he’s just getting started.

The triumphant Senate Democratic leader sat in his Capitol office Thursday and described a “long-term effort” to build on his party’s gains and create a “durable” majority — largely by proving to voters “that we really can get things done.”

“We’re going to keep building. We’re going to build over the next two years first by passing things, or at least fighting hard for things that people want, and we know they want,” he said, adding, “If we do that, we can expand the map.”

It’s a pledge that gained immense new credibility Tuesday when Democrats defied warnings about the unfavorable 2026 Senate map and picked up seats in several states President Donald Trump won two years earlier. Democratic candidates are also ahead in the two uncalled races, in Alaska and Mississippi.

Now Schumer is on track to keep his leadership post and plot his party’s effort to exploit an even more advantageous lineup of races in 2028.

Democrats will need to hold on to their newly-won seat in Ohio, and they also have to defend seats in traditional swing states like Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Nevada. But Republicans have several vulnerabilities of their own — including seats in Wisconsin, which just elected an all-Democratic state government; North Carolina, which just saw its GOP-majority congressional delegation decimated; and in other states Democrats just won including Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina.

But to make good on his dreams of expansion, Schumer must unite and effectively manage the various factions within his caucus over the next two years. Complicating that job will be the looming free-for-all presidential primary that could involve several of his members — not to mention Schumer’s own 2028 reelection decision.

Had Democrats had a bad night Tuesday, Schumer could have faced an early test in securing another term as leader — with some progressives groups eager to force a conversation about new blood in the top ranks.

Some incoming Democratic freshmen have vowed not to back Schumer as leader, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who is eyeing a 2028 White House bid, wants to have conversations about the majority’s legislative agenda before Democrats hold a leadership election, which is expected in early December.

“The Democratic caucus needs to have a discussion about what we should do with this new responsibility that has been entrusted with us, and we should have a full and honest discussion in our caucus about what the plan is, what direction we want to go in,” Van Hollen said in an interview.

But the electoral romp has extinguished any serious discussion of making a change at the top, with many Democrats saying Schumer richly earned another two years in charge.

“Trust me, had the results turned out differently, we would be saying it was a result of disastrous leadership,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said in an interview. “So if it works to our favor, then I think we have a right to say that it was a result of some things that went well.”

For his part, Schumer has moved to downplay any suggestion of tension within his suddenly much more ideologically and geographically diverse caucus. In the interview, he noted his friendly relations with both hard-left firebrand Abdul El-Sayed — one of the freshmen who say they want a new leader — and moderate Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton in Kansas.

“The media wants to make it, ‘This is going to be a fight,’” Schumer said. “It’s not. I speak to all these candidates. I speak to Abdul all the time. I speak to Hamilton all the time. We’re on the same page.”

While red-state Democrats had become all but extinct in the Senate over the past decade, Schumer is not a stranger to managing ideological tensions in his ranks. During his first stint as majority leader under then-President Joe Biden, he presided over a threadbare 50-seat majority where maverick Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona frequently frustrated the remainder of the caucus.

Schumer said he views his incoming red-state Democrats differently than those predecessors, saying they ran on the same platform as his members in deep-blue coastal states.

“When they ran, they each ran individually, on their own,” he said, referring to the likes of Manchin and Sinema. “We have from one end of the country to the other the message of cost, chaos, and corruption.”

Schumer pointed to the host of policy proposals that Democrats have rolled out over the past two years as a roadmap for the Senate’s upcoming legislative agenda, broadly addressing topics including housing, health care and energy. Still — even if Democrats run the table in the remaining races — they will be short of the 60-vote filibuster threshold necessary for advancing most bills.

While he said Democrats are “going to do everything we can to pass legislation,” Schumer would not directly address how to get bills to Trump’s desk. He batted down questions over whether Democrats should pursue the party-line reconciliation process or carve up the chamber’s legislative filibuster even if the bills they pass have no chance of getting signed into law.

He did issue a warning to Republicans about any potential obstruction — and took a shot at Trump, whom he has yet to speak to following the election.

“We’re not going to wait for Trump,” Schumer said. “Who knows what the hell he’ll do? But we’re going to put solutions on the table.”

And if Republican senators “stand in the way,” he added, “I think the election of 2028 will make 2026 look tame because they’re so out of touch with the American people.”

The ultimate goal, he said, is to take action on critical matters and show voters what a red-state Democrat might look like versus what “they’re told about what Democrats are [on] Fox News.”

After successfully wooing candidates like former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown into winning 2026 races, Schumer said he hasn’t started recruiting for 2028, but that he believes Democrats now have footholds that will make winning in red states easier.

“I’ve spent decades working to change the Senate map,” he said. “This is a real, unique opportunity, planned out, and now we’ve got to make sure it lasts.”

Calen Razor and Lauren Fedor contributed to this report.