Congress
Will Michael Bennet Shift his Fight Against Trump to the State House?
Michael Bennet seemed destined for a lifetime appointment to the Senate.
He was tapped for a vacancy in 2009, the same moment Colorado was turning perpetually blue. The Democratic son of the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and grandson of another political hand, Bennet brought lineage, his own impressive resume and, most significant of all, a thoughtful, affable and moderate sensibility to a chamber that once rewarded all three qualities.
Yet after accumulating 16 years, and well-positioned for another decade-plus of service having just turned 60, Bennet is poised to walk away from seniority, the Senate and Washington, the city where he was raised.
He’s frustrated with Congress, yes, but also Joe Biden’s selfishness, what Donald Trump has done to both parties and the corrosive impact of social media on politics, the media and even the once-presumed idea of shared facts.
Bennet is almost certain to run for governor in his adopted state next year, according to multiple Democrats in Washington and Denver.
In an hour-long interview this week, Bennet made little attempt to hide his intentions, telling me he’ll reveal his plans in early April.
“The central fight is whether or not we can create an economy where people feel like when they work hard they get ahead,” he said. “And I think the answer to that over the next decade is as likely to come from the states as it is from Washington.”
Reminded about his father’s staff tenure — stints with a pair of Cold War senators in addition to his committee post — the senator noted that Douglas Bennet Jr. also eventually left the Senate to run USAID and eventually NPR and Wesleyan University.
“I wish he were still alive, because I wish I could ask him his advice,” Bennet said. “And I think what he would tell me is, notwithstanding the fact that he worked here and he loved this place, he also moved on to do other things. And he might say, take what you’ve learned and find a place to be as effective as you can be.”
That Michael Farrand Bennet is no longer sure the Senate is a place to be effective is as harsh an indictment I can recall of what was once unironically called the world’s greatest deliberative body.
He’s not the only lawmaker headed for the exits. Already this year, before the first quarter even ended, Democratic Sens. Gary Peters, Tina Smith and Jeanne Shaheen announced they wouldn’t run again.
Some of this owes to simply hitting retirement age or dreading a prolonged life in the minority. But when taken together with all the lawmakers in both parties who’ve walked away since Donald Trump’s first election, it’s undeniable that what was once a political pinnacle has become a place for some that’s just not worth the hassle.
After all, the Senate was usually what governors graduated to, even if they preferred their old jobs, not an office one left for the statehouse. Look no further than the trajectory of Bennet’s colleague and former boss: Senator, and former governor, John Hickenlooper. War and peace, treaties and the Supreme Court, affairs of state, were determined in the nation’s capital. Prisons, roads and schools were left to the states.
What makes Bennet’s frustrations so meaningful, and illuminating, however, is that they go far beyond the usual bill of particulars. Sure, he’s exasperated with — and has even compiled research about! — the trend toward the consolidation of power and the diminution of the committee barons he met when he arrived in the Senate in the last years of the World War II generation.
“The duties of the senators have been sucked up basically into the leadership of the Senate,” he said, adding that “the decision-making among the four corners in the Congress has in some sense dispossessed the other actors.”
Bennet dodged questions about whether Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer should continue to lead the caucus, but was candid about the leadership void.
“I think we need a strategy, and I think we need a plan, and we need a message,” he said, adding: “And if current leadership can’t figure out how to do that, then the caucus will figure out how to do that.”
Is the current message entirely: Trump is bad?
“I think the current message is basically, yeah, Trump’s bad.”
Bennet’s obvious misery of serving in Trump-era Washington is in some ways more notable than his unhappiness with Schumer. And this gets at something that isn’t sufficiently appreciated. The departures, some voluntary and others less so, of anti-Trump Republicans have been well-documented.
But Trump has also made Congress a lot less appealing for serious-minded Democrats who want to legislate and suddenly find most of their GOP counterparts are barely coping, living a lie or in thrall to a personality cult.
“That has been a big change, that’s a big difference,” said Bennet, citing the departures of John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. “There are people here, but it’s also true across the country, for whom Trump’s approach to politics has become normalized.”
More to the point, he said: “I’d be lying, if I said — It’s tough when you got everybody on the other side voting for Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense.”
Put another way, there’s simply not going to be a robust debate over, say, the refundability of the Child Tax Credit, a Bennet priority, when every day revolves around what Trump or his administration just said or did.
He calls it “shirts and skins,” tribal politics, and he deplores the culture. But this is where I should note, clearly, what Bennet emphasized: that he’s eager to remain in the fray.
He wants to confront Trumpism, he said. And, for a 60-year-old, he is unusually conscious of his own mortality, a trait he may have because of his father’s passing at 79, his mother’s youthful escape from the Holocaust and his own treatment for prostate cancer.
I had suggested to Bennet that his own potential early exit from the Senate along with his brother James’s unhappy departure from the New York Times both had a tragic quality. Here were enormously talented siblings who would’ve flourished in an earlier, more consensus-oriented era.
“I don’t feel like I was born too late,” the senator said, after citing all the policy goals he’s still eager to enact on the economy, healthcare, education and sustaining the American dream. “I think that my expectations about where we would be and the progress that we have made turn out not to have been fulfilled. And I am becoming incredibly impatient with the notion that I could die before seeing this to-do list addressed.”
That impatience has intensified since Trump’s second election, an event that I told Bennet seemed to jar him. “It definitely did,” he acknowledged, “it definitely did.”
Which triggers his deep discontent with his own party.
Bennet has long been frustrated with Washington — he wrote a 2019 book lacerating “the pathological culture of the capital” — but Trump’s return seemed to mark a personal pivot point.
“I can’t say that I was surprised, but I find it shocking that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump twice, once after he took away a woman’s right to choose, you know, and with all of the convictions and everything else,” he said. “And you know what? I hate to say this, there are many things that I blame Donald Trump for but getting elected is not one of them.”
For that he blames Biden. Bennet himself barely left a mark when he ran for president in 2020 and he acknowledged Biden may have been the only Democrat who could have defeated Trump that year.
However, the Coloradoan was one of the first Senate Democrats to say publicly what was obvious to all of them: that Biden couldn’t win the election after his disastrous debate. And Bennet was one of the loudest critics of Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, on the way out of office.
His irritation doesn’t seem to have receded.
“What I would say to the American people who are frustrated that the Democratic Party has not fought hard enough to provide a compelling alternative to Donald Trump, a big piece of that was the decision that Joe Biden made to run for re-election,” said Bennet.
“The Democratic Party,” he continued, “didn’t show up as a fighting force during the Biden administration.”
But Bennet conceded that, no, he never privately urged Biden or the former president’s top aides to not run again in the first place. “I wish I had,” he said. “I wish we all had.”
Recalling a caucus meeting after the now-infamous debate, Bennet recounted telling his colleagues that “if we elect Donald Trump president, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, for the people coming after us.”
That’s what plainly eats at Bennet. It’s not just Biden’s vanity, and the failure of the rest of the party to intervene well before last summer, but the deeper failures of Democrats and the potential implications of those failures.
Though much closer to the center than his party’s progressives, Bennet reflects the widened policy aperture of this moment and pans Democrats’ timidity from both the left and the right.
“When I think about this last election, was it important for us to make sure that we were extending the Obamacare tax credits for health care?” he asks. “Of course it was. But shouldn’t we be standing for universal health care in this country? Shouldn’t we be standing for universal mental health care, especially for our kids who have been so incredibly affected by Covid and by social media?”
Yet on education, an area of personal expertise dating to his time running Denver’s public schools, Bennet said his party needs to be bolder.
“We have to recognize that our system of public education has to be dragged from the 19th century to the 21st century, what are our ideas for that?” he said, all but rolling his eyes as he recalled that much of what Democrats say about the topic begins and ends with “forgiving student loan debt.”
And it wasn’t just 2024.
“The Democratic Party failed to make a compelling case in really a generation worth of elections,” Bennet argued.
He recognizes, however, that the great challenges of the present are less tactical than structural.
He’s no nostalgist — “I don’t mourn the analog world,” Bennet said — but he said “our tribal instincts have been concretized by the medium of the internet.” And it’s digital technology that must resolve that problem so that Americans can “have a shared understanding of the facts.”
Perhaps because of his brother — who was hounded out of his job as the Times’ editorial page editor by liberals angered over an op-ed written by conservative Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton — or perhaps just because he’s a reader, Bennet returned repeatedly to what social media and its attendant algorithms had done to sow division and make folly of the Moynihan maxim that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.
“We have had many reactionary periods in American history,” he said. “Those have always been followed by a progressive period. Always, always. The only difference right now, between our lives and those lives, is we destroyed our journalism in America.”
The ”old political order has collapsed,” said Bennet and “the journalistic order has collapsed with it.”
But what remains, he emphasized, is his appetite for building what comes next.
“Whatever I do is not going to signify a retreat from anything,” Bennet said. “What I’m trying to figure out is where the fight can best be joined.”
Denver’s golden dome awaits.
President Donald Trump and top White House officials are privately lobbying Republican senators to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp that’s set to kick in this fall.
At the Trump administration’s urging, the government funding patch the Senate is working to pass this week would push off the forthcoming ban of some cannabis products derived from hemp. But several Republican senators are demanding a vote to strip the delay out and let that prohibition kick in come November.
They’re hearing from the White House about it.
Trump called Sen. Ted Budd on Tuesday night, after the North Carolina Republican filed an amendment to ensure the ban kicks in as mandated on Nov. 12, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion. On the call, the president discussed creating a federal regulatory framework for hemp but did not ask Budd to withdraw his amendment, the individual added.
“I’ve been asked by lots of people to stand down on this amendment,” Budd told reporters Wednesday.
Budd noted that the Trump administration has had almost nine months to come up with a plan for implementing the ban.
“So why all of a sudden pop up for some seemingly innocent delay?” he asked, accusing the White House of instead preparing to “jam this on some must-pass” funding package at year’s end to further delay the prohibition.
A White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private debate said the Trump administration is seeking “a modest four-week delay” through the Dec. 11 expiration of the funding patch “to allow for productive conversations to continue.” Some synthetic cannabis products would be permanently banned in the meantime, the official added.
The administration lobbying has successfully swayed some Senate Republicans, such as Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who said in an interview that “the White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry.”
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of hemp-rich Kentucky said the issue came up “in a big way” during Senate Republicans’ private lunch meeting Wednesday. Paul said he spoke in support of delaying the ban and said those arguing for a delay “aren’t very rational.”
“They’re wanting to hold up the funding for the government over one month,” he said. “It’s kind of insane.”
Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.
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Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) declined to respond directly Wednesday to Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to denounce his former son-in-law Rep. Max Miller over abuse accusations leveled by Moreno’s daughter: “These aren’t accusations in my world,” he said.
“In my world, this is the reality,” Moreno told reporters at the Capitol. “This is not something that is theoretical to me. This is my lived reality of my daughter and my family every single solitary day.”
In an interview with Dasha Burns for Blue Light News’s The Conversation, Johnson declined to take sides in the dispute between Miller (R-Ohio) and Emily Moreno. He called for a House Ethics probe to “play out.”
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