It is fair to say that lawmakers in the modern era could not have imagined a president like Trump, or, at least, not with anywhere near sufficient clarity or concern to craft laws to effectively contain an Executive Branch that not only ignores longstanding legal and political norms and statutory interpretations, but relishes breaking through them with staggering frequency and speed. Richard Nixon had nothing on Donald Trump, and so it is no surprise that even Nixon-era reforms — such as the War Powers Act (1973) and the Impoundment Control Act (1974) — have proven woefully insufficient in this moment.

The idea of exploiting weaknesses in the law was very much part of the plan for Trump’s second term, put out in the open ahead of the 2024 election by Russ Vought — now running the Office of Management and Budget — who said that he was creating a “shadow” legal cabinet and preparing legal arguments to steamroll those who had previously gotten in the way of his reactionary program. Among the goals of Vought’s shadow cabinet was to find a way to decimate federal agencies and punish the professionals running them: “We want to put them in trauma,” Vought said. (He specifically cited the potential for the Impoundment Control Act to serve as an instrument for this plan.)

From shutting down government agencies to firing thousands of federal workers, withholding SNAP benefits from Americans, and more, Trump’s administration has demonstrated a brazen disregard for longstanding and relied-upon rules, norms, and programs, triggering court battles across the country to determine the legality of these actions. This will be, undoubtedly, the most litigated presidential term in history. In just the first 14 months since he retook office, Trump’s administration has been challenged in court more than 700 times.

As cases against the Trump administration have moved through the judicial system, a highly politicized Department of Justice has been armed with arguments that stretch the interpretations of laws to their most cynical boundaries. While Trump’s team is losing many of these battles, in other cases they have managed to provide partisan judges with sufficiently colorable arguments to rule in their favor. Of the nearly 240 cases that have been adjudicated by district courts, and those that made their way to circuit courts, Trump has prevailed more than 40% of the time. And of the cases that have made their way up to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration has an 80% win rate.

These statistics reveal the administration’s overall strategy: find even the most improbable loopholes in our laws to exploit, and relentlessly appeal unfavorable rulings until they reach the Supreme Court, where Republican-appointed justices are more likely than not to rule in Trump’s favor.

Democrats must reform the Supreme Court and take action to permanently depoliticize the Department of Justice; I would push to pass Sen. Ron Wyden’s Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act and Rep. Dan Goldman’s Prohibiting Political Prosecutions Act for starters. But we also need to prepare for a total legal reconstruction to address the gaps in law that have made this all possible. This paper focuses on some of the most significant statutes whose weaknesses have been brought to light by Trump administration actions. The overall imperative for Democrats is to prioritize this work when it comes to planning for and governing in the majority.

I. Restoring Congressional Appropriations Authority

President Trump has made a habit of engaging in what some scholars have called “appropriations presidentialism.” Essentially, he (wrongfully) claims that presidential authority gives him the right to unilaterally impound or withhold funds from distribution that have been duly appropriated by Congress.

In reality, the “power of the purse” — the power to appropriate money — sits solely in the hands of Congress, enshrined by Article 1 of the Constitution. In normal times, this takes the form of congressional negotiations over spending levels for agencies and programs across the federal government. When agreement is reached, the executive branch is responsible for obligating those funds — making sure that they are properly distributed. The executive branch does not, however, get to decide if the funds get distributed.

Trump is not the first president to mess with this process. Richard Nixon’s unilateral withholding of funds from programs that he didn’t like prompted Congress to enact the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA). The ICA was intended to solidify Congress’s control over any efforts by the executive to defer or rescind funds. Under the ICA, if the president wishes to rescind funds that have been appropriated by Congress, the president must send a special message to Congress. Once the message is sent, the president can freeze the funds for 45 days, during which time Congress may vote to formally rescind those funds. If Congress does not act within those 45 days, the funds must be obligated, according to the law. This process played out in July 2025, when President Trump sent a special message to Congress seeking to rescind $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Congress then enacted legislation approving the rescission. Awful, but lawful.

Shortly thereafter, however, the Trump administration exploited a weakness in the ICA with the goal of subverting the will of Congress on appropriated funding — exactly what the law was intended to prevent. On August 28, 2025, the administration sent a special message to Congress proposing to rescind $4 billion in foreign aid. The appropriation behind this funding was set to expire on September 30, 2025, the end of the federal government’s fiscal year. And so, the Trump administration asserted, even if Congress did not approve the rescission, the funds would, in effect, evaporate before the 45-day clock ran out.

This idea has been termed a “pocket rescission,” borrowing from the idea of a “pocket veto.” It is nearly unprecedented; the Congressional Research Service was able to identify three instances from the 1970s — and nothing since — where appropriations expired pending presidential rescission requests; all three involved tens of millions of dollars, rather than the $4 billion here; and in none of these cases did the President set out to run the clock. It almost certainly was not the intention of lawmakers, who specifically passed the law to shore up Congress’s authority in the appropriations process after power struggles with the Nixon administration. The Trump administration’s legal theory hinges on a technical issue in the law: the statute prohibits requests for funding deferrals from carrying over into the next fiscal year, but does not have similarly explicit language when it comes to rescissions.

The Trump administration’s pocket rescission was challenged in Washington, D.C.’s District Court, where Judge Amir Ali found in favor of plaintiffs who were set to receive funds and directed the government to distribute them. The Trump administration then appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, seeking an emergency stay of the lower court’s order. On September 26, 2025, just days before the end of the federal government’s fiscal year, the Supreme Court, through its opaque emergency docket, allowed the Trump administration to effectuate its pocket rescission. Here, the Court hung its hat on a different technicality, finding that language in the ICA precluded the prospective recipients of funds from suing to enforce an appropriation.

The Trump administration’s impoundment strategy, blessed by the Supreme Court, represents a dramatic seizure of power by the Executive Branch and the evisceration of a critical piece of Congress’s authority. Democrats in Congress should amend the ICA in two critical ways to restore this authority:

1. Make clear that prospective recipients of appropriated funds have standing to sue to enforce the ICA.

2. Direct that any funds frozen by an unapproved rescission request at the end of the fiscal year be released. This would prevent pocket rescissions by, in effect, setting all rescission requests to expire at the end of the fiscal year at which time, in the absence of Congressional approval, funds would be released.

II. Limiting Use of the Insurrection Act

Our Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of the use of a standing army to interfere with civilian life, fearful that the military could be used to uphold tyranny and infringe on civil liberties. In the centuries that followed, Congress developed a number of laws to ensure that the President could not use the Federal military for domestic law enforcement purposes, including the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. This law bars the military from intervening or participating in civilian law enforcement — like riot response, arrests, or crowd control — unless they are expressly authorized to do so by federal law.

In late 2025, President Trump made a serious effort to break through these limitations. Over the course of several months, Trump deployed the National Guard to cities including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Portland, arguing their presence was necessary to “get crime out of our cities” and to fight “a war from within.” The deployments, which put thousands of federal law enforcement on American streets, were strongly opposed by local residents and cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $500 million. Trump relied on Title 10 of the U.S. Code to justify his actions. His administration’s legal argument failed at the Supreme Court in December of 2025. Just a few days later, Trump announced he was withdrawing federal troops from all cities.

There is reason to believe, however, that Trump is not done testing the limits of the law. In particular, he threatened — in response to anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis — to use the Insurrection Act to provide for the deployment of the National Guard and overcome the limitations of the Posse Comitatus Act. The Insurrection Act is broadly and vaguely written to give the President the power to decide “as he considers necessary” to use military force against “obstructions,” “combinations,” or “assemblages” that make laws “impracticable to enforce.” The power that the statute accords to the President was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1827, which ruled in Martin v. Mott that “the authority to decide whether [an exigency requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”

The Insurrection Act has been invoked roughly thirty times over the course of history, most recently in 1992, in California. Importantly, all of its invocations have been either at the request of governors or to respond to the obstruction of civil rights by state officials themselves. Not since 1965 has the Insurrection Act been used in the absence of a request by a governor, and the specific nature of Trump’s contemplated deployment would be completely unprecedented.

What Trump’s recklessness has revealed is the danger inherent in the vagueness of the Insurrection Act, and the need for Congress to reform the law so that it cannot be used by any Executive to persecute the citizenry. There are a number of legislative proposals aimed at achieving this goal, including the Insurrection Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Chris Deluzio (PA-17) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (CT).

Whatever specific form the legislation takes, Congress should make a number of key changes to the Insurrection Act:

1. Limit the basis on which the Insurrection Act may be invoked to circumstances where Americans’ constitutional rights or safety is in jeopardy.

2. Establish that the Insurrection Act does not provide for the suspension of habeas corpus or the imposition of martial law.

3. Require the President to provide a written justification to Congress for any invocation of the Insurrection Act, and require Congressional approval for extended deployments.

III. Ending Discretionary Deportations

As part of his mass deportation program, Trump has used two statutes to completely ignore due process: the Alien Enemies Act, and provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act.

The Alien Enemies Act allows the President to apprehend, restrain, and remove the natives of an “enemy country” if there has been a declared war or an invasion from that country. In other words, as the Brennan Center has noted, it is “an authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry.” Prior to President Trump’s invocation in March of last year, the law had only been used three times in American history: during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. In all three of these instances, the United States had formally declared war.

Moreover, during World War II, the law was part of some of the most shameful actions by the U.S. government against civilians in our history. It was used by the federal government to detain tens of thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian natives, sending many to now-infamous internment camps, based on what Congress has since acknowledged was “racial prejudice” and “wartime hysteria,” “without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented.”

Last year, Trump attempted to use the Alien Enemies Act to round up, detain, and deport Venezuelan nationals. Trump has claimed that the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang’s presence in the United States is tantamount to a coordinated invasion, therefore satisfying the Alien Enemies Act’s threshold for use. The Trump administration deported, without proper due process, 252 Venezuelans they claimed were members of TdA to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. While the President’s attempts to use this law to carry out unlawful deportations have largely been blocked in court (with the Supreme Court agreeing that the administration cannot invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans without due process), the statute stands as a significant potential threat to liberty.

Similarly, provisions incorporated in 1990 into the McCarran-Walter Act give the Executive Branch broad discretionary authority to deport non-citizens, which Trump has used. The statutory language is jarringly open-ended in the power it provides to the Secretary of state:

“An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”

There is, of course, an entire statutory framework for the removal of non-citizens who are convicted of a broad array of crimes. There is a far lower bar for the removal of non-citizens involved in any way with terrorist activity. But this section language from McCarran-Walter sits alongside those laws to provide a fast-pass for the government, at its whim, to send law-abiding non-citizen residents out of the country.

Congress should:

1. Repeal the Alien Enemies Act in its entirety.

2. Repeal the “adverse foreign policy consequences” provision of the McCarran-Walter Act.

IV. Protecting the Right to Vote

One question I am asked most frequently is whether we will have free and fair elections this November. I hope that we do, and still think that we (mostly) will. But Trump has done and said enough to attack the bedrock of our democracy — the ability of our citizenry to choose its government and, in doing so, hold our elected leaders to account — that it is far from a sure thing. At the first available opportunity, Congress must shore up voting rights and protect our electoral processes.

Since the start of his second presidency, Trump has issued two Executive Orders aimed at limiting access to the ballot—one in March 2025, and one this past March—which aim to restrict voter registration and the ability of voters to cast their ballots by mail.

Despite the fact that there are virtually no noncitizens voting in our election, Trump’s first executive order attempted to leverage federal funds to impose strict “show-your-papers” requirements, which would put the burden on voters to prove their citizenship despite more than 21 million American citizens lacking any citizenship documents. Trump claimed broad “Presidential authority” to circumvent the Constitution’s States and Elections Clause, which states that the President does not have the authority to regulate elections because:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”

Trump also tried to justify his antidemocratic actions by pointing to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. Trump claimed that the NVRA, which was passed with the goal of increasing voter registration (including at the DMV), authorized his “show-your-papers” requirement. The District Court in D.C. was unpersuaded, finding that while the law does require citizenship information to be verified through sworn attestation, it explicitly prohibits “any requirement for… formal authentication.” Trump also attempted to use the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a government agency created by HAVA in the wake of the controversial 2000 presidential election, to direct states to alter their federal registration forms to include citizenship information. The District Court found this to be illegal in the same decision, noting that the EAC was meant to be an “independent regulatory agency” whose powers could be modified only by Congress, not the President. Two other district courts — one in Massachusetts and one in Washington — have come to the same conclusion, resulting in a number of injunctions. Their rulings have been appealed by the Trump administration.

Trump, undeterred by the three district court decisions, is attempting to once again unilaterally alter voting laws through the Executive Order he issued on March 31, 2026. Rather than require voters to present citizenship documents in order to register, Trump wants to pre-screen voters and give ballots only to those deemed qualified. Specifically, the Order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of eligible voters drawn from data sources that are widely considered incomplete and unreliable — despite the absence of any clear legal authority to do so. Central to this effort is the SAVE database, which the Executive is pressuring states to adopt as a voter verification tool. The SAVE database was created under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 to verify immigration status for federal benefit programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and employment eligibility. It was designed to determine whether someone qualifies for government social services, not to establish citizenship, and its records are often out of date or inaccurate.

The order also designates the United States Postal Service (USPS) as responsible for determining who is eligible to vote by mail, and instructs it to withhold ballot delivery to anyone who does not appear on the federal voter list. This is an unprecedented expansion of USPS’s role; the postal service has never before been involved in voter registration or eligibility, and has been straining for years to deliver on its core mandate. Finally, the order threatens criminal penalties against anyone who assists a person in voting if that person does not appear on the federal list.

Trump’s DOJ has argued that the federal government is responsible for overseeing citizenship—and that since voting is based on citizenship status, the federal government should, by extension, have the authority to limit voting to citizens verified by the SAVE database. The Constitution’s States and Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1), however, states plainly that the authority to grant voting rights rests with state legislatures and Congress. Additionally, the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which transformed the Post Office Department (which was subject to executive control) into the USPS, establishes that the President wields no executive authority over the independent agency.

Trump’s recent executive order, therefore, faces significant legal hurdles, but to firmly preclude future attempts to nationalize and control voter registration, Congress must:

1. Codify into law the District Court’s decision on the NVRA and HAVA, which establishes constitutional limits on presidential authority over elections. More specifically, Congress should legislate that the EAC is an independent agency whose mandate can only be determined by Congress, that the NVRA’s sworn attestation standard cannot be overridden by executive action, and that federal funding may not be conditioned on state voter laws.

2. Bar the federal government from demanding, collecting, or centralizing voter registration data. This includes explicitly prohibiting the use of the SAVE database, or any existing federal database, from being used for voter verification purposes.

3. Explicitly ban documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements.

In addition to what Trump is trying to achieve through his executive orders, his administration and political allies have talked openly about deploying federal law enforcement to poll sites for this year’s midterms. On February 3, 2026, Steve Bannon publicly said that the Trump administration would be sending ICE agents to “surround” voting locations during the midterm elections: “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November.” Additionally, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in February that she “can’t guarantee an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November,” calling it a “silly hypothetical question.”

There is already a federal law on the books — 18 U.S.C. § 592, passed in 1865 — that bans “troops or armed men” from being deployed where an election is being held. The law, however, does not address the question of whether, say, ICE agents without weapons would be barred from intimidating voters in the way that the 1865 law aimed to preclude. Likewise, the law does not address vote counting or certification processes, which have become epicenters of conflict over election results. Given that Trump has already deployed federal law enforcement to assist with bogus election fraud claims, these are not abstract concerns.

In response to threats of ICE presence at polling sites, Democrats need to:

1. Prohibit all federal law enforcement from operating within 500 feet of poll sites, explicitly naming DHS, ICE, and FBI agents.

2. Prohibit all federal law enforcement from taking part in vote counting or certification processes, and from entering ballot storage facilities and election offices without a judicial warrant based on specific evidence of a crime.

Finally, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 was enacted to combat racial discrimination in voting. The bill, often described as “one of the most successful civil rights measures in history,” contained a number of crucial provisions: outlawing literacy tests, banning discriminatory gerrymandering, providing a right to sue for affected voters, and requiring jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to receive federal pre-clearance before they make changes to their election laws.

The law has been reauthorized five times since its passage. However, a conservative majority in the Supreme Court has repeatedly taken on the VRA in recent years, seeking to strip it down. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the formula used to determine which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance; meanwhile, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) made it much more difficult for plaintiffs to prove racial bias in discriminatory voting laws. And most recently, on April 29th, the Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais to make it functionally impossible for states to consider race when drawing congressional lines.

To preserve the vital objectives of the VRA, Congress needs to:

1. Pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would implement a new, modern formula to determine which jurisdictions have a history of racial discrimination. This would restore the federal pre-clearance standard that has been functionally dead since the Shelby decision in 2013.

2. Clarify the legal standard for plaintiffs to prove racial discrimination in how election districts are drawn, as well as in how they are affected by state laws.

3. Pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would proactively expand the right to vote to millions of Americans by requiring states to offer early voting and mail voting, implementing automatic and same-day voter registration, combatting election misinformation and voter intimidation, and more.

V. Reestablishing Congressional War Powers

Over the past several months, Trump has dragged the United States into a number of armed conflicts without regard for the rule of law, risk to American servicemembers, the number of civilians killed abroad, the tremendous cost to American taxpayers, collateral impacts, or even whether there was a coherent plan to achieve the President’s own ostensible goals. He has illegally struck boats in the Caribbean, kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation in Venezuela, and launched a war in Iran, all while flouting norms and the rule of law.

The Founders vested Congress with the sole authority to bring the nation into war in the Declare War Clause of the Constitution. They recognized that this was a power too great to vest in the hands of one individual. Congress, however, has formally issued a declaration of war only 11 times in American history (and not since World War II), opting instead to rely on Authorizations for Use of Military Force that allow the President to launch military hostilities within limited parameters.

In the 1960s and 1970s, successive Presidents abused the narrow authority granted to them by Congress through AUMFs. President Nixon engaged in extensive bombing campaigns in Cambodia that were kept a secret from both the American public and Congress. In response to Nixon’s gross abuse of power, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) in 1973, which was intended to limit the unilateral authority of the President to bring our nation into war. The WPR, which was passed over Nixon’s veto, required a number of key processes in the event of American military engagements:

• Section 3 requires the President to consult Congress “in every possible instance” before U.S. Armed Forces are sent into hostilities;

• Section 4 requires the President to provide Congressional leaders with a written report within 48 hours of the introduction of armed forces; and

• Section 5 requires the President to terminate any use of forces within 60 days, unless Congress declares war or the period is extended, and empowers Congress to end a military action by passing a concurrent resolution.

The WPR has been flouted by every single President since its passage. Trump is not, unfortunately, the exception, but rather part of what is now a fifty-year tradition. Presidents from both parties have exploited gaps in the law to engage in what are, in any common-sense definition of the phrase, acts of war without congressional oversight. Members of Congress, perhaps happy to be relieved of responsibility for difficult questions of war and peace, have been complicit in the erosion of this critical separation of powers.

There are a number of arguments that Presidents have used to ignore the WPR or evade its intent. Multiple Presidents have argued that the law is, at its core, unconstitutional. After he sent U.S. troops into Venezuela to capture its president and dictator, Nicolás Maduro, Trump shared a post on Truth Social stating that “the War Powers Act is Unconstitutional, totally violating Article II of the Constitution.” Article II of the Constitution, which establishes the President as the Commander-in-Chief, has often been invoked to justify the President’s supremacy on military matters. The Supreme Court, however, has never weighed in on the constitutionality of the WPR.

Several administrations have taken military activities that walk and talk like war and argued that they are, in fact, not “war” at all. At a certain point, this argument makes the WPR in general a dead letter. Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the military strike in Venezuela as “a law enforcement function to capture an indicted drug trafficker.” The Trump administration has argued the war in Iran was one of self-defense and therefore authorized by the WPR.

There are also a number of loopholes that have been manipulated to subvert the intention of the WPR. Since the Resolution specifies that “hostilities” must be mentioned in the report to Congress in order for the WPR’s 60-day clock on military action to begin running, Presidents have simply neglected to include the term—including in instances where tens of thousands of airstrikes were executed. With regard to the law’s requirement for pre-consultation, vague language in Section 3 has allowed presidents to argue that a simple phone call to Congressional leaders satisfies the law, even if it only occurs after the attacks have concluded. Finally, even if a War Powers Resolution were passed today, its effectiveness would be significantly limited by INS v. Chadha, a Supreme Court ruling from 1983. This decision ruled that any congressional action must be presented to the President in order to carry the full force of law, invalidating the WPR’s concurrent resolution mechanism. As such, if a WPR were to pass Congress today, it could be vetoed by the President and the war would continue—unless a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress voted to override, a nearly insurmountable bar.

In response to the long history of Presidents circumventing the War Powers Resolution, Congress should:

1. Amend the War Powers Resolution to clearly define the term “consultation,” as suggested in 1973 by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) but never put into law. Additionally, the WPR should explicitly state that consultation should take place with the Gang of Eight, as has often been done in practice.

2. Amend the WPR to clearly define the term “hostilities” as suggested by the same 1973 HFAC report, which argued the term “encompasses a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired but where there is a clear and present danger of armed conflict.” Additionally, the term should be updated for modern warfare and include not only the presence of U.S. ground troops but also drone strikes, cyber operations, and more.

3. Establish grounds for enforcement of violations of the WPR and standing for individual service members who were deployed in the context of a violation.

In the first part of the series, I discussed the grave danger this regime poses and the damage it has already done to our rule of law, safety, and future, and prescribed steps that Democrats in Congress should take now to stop Republicans from continuing to enable Trump’s moves toward authoritarian rule. Importantly, those proposals were made within the current framework of power in Washington, with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. In this analysis, I extend that framework to consider a hopeful circumstance in which Democrats win back at least one chamber of Congress in 2026, and start to address the question: What should Democrats do next?

The rules of Congress don’t lend themselves kindly to the minority party. Conversely, a legislative majority has significant authority and discretion. In a scenario in which a party controls one or two chambers of Congress but not the executive branch, one of the critical tools available to that party is investigative subpoena power. This gives a House or Senate majority the ability to conduct thorough and detailed oversight of the executive branch through committee hearings, with the ability to summon witnesses and take testimony. Should Democrats win back the House in 2026, this will be one of the most potent and essential tools we have to audit the public and private illegal actions of the Trump Administration and to hold him and his lackeys accountable to the American people.

Power of Oversight

Inextricably intertwined with Congress’s Article I power to legislate is its “power of oversight.” In making laws, Congress also has a responsibility to ensure they are being applied properly and that abuses of power and unlawful activity within the executive branch are addressed. As the Supreme Court has affirmed, “[a] legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information.…”

Subpoena power, a vital component of Congress’s investigative authority, allows congressional committees to legally compel records or testimony from individuals or organizations. Recipients must comply with congressional subpoenas, and failure to do so can result in civil or criminal consequences. The rules of the House empower committees to authorize and issue subpoenas either by majority vote or at the discretion of the chair of the committee. They also empower the majority party to call and notice committee hearings.

To that end, the majority party has near-total control over summoning investigative hearings and issuing subpoenas to conduct executive branch oversight. Of course, if one party controls both chambers and the presidency, there is very little incentive for them to use this power and investigate their own party’s behavior, as we have seen in the 119th Congress. If Democrats win the House back in 2026, however, it means that Democrats will be able to legally demand evidence and testimony related to presidential directives and Republican policies. It would give House Democrats the opportunity to force the administration to publicly contend with its corrupt, illegal, and democracy-imperiling conduct and bring incriminating evidence into the light of day.

We have seen this tool strategically deployed by both parties to set election narratives, uncover wrongdoing, and force their opponents to address unpopular or dangerous actions. In 2021, then-Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi formed the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The Committee, led by Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson, issued more than 100 subpoenas to members of Congress, executive branch employees, and private companies. In a series of ten public hearings, the Committee used evidence from and questioned those witnesses, uncovering text messages, emails, and directives from the president and his advisors that would have otherwise been hidden from the American public.

The hearings were watched by more than 20 million people, a viewership size that is closer to that of a Sunday Night Football game than a typical congressional hearing. The January 6th hearings set a meaningful example for how Democrats can use subpoena power to expose lawlessness by the Trump Administration.

I should acknowledge here that some interpreted Trump’s return to the White House as evidence that the January 6th hearings were ineffective and a poor strategy. I disagree with this conclusion for any number of reasons, chief among them that a scenario in which Trump is President while Democrats control the House and/or the Senate (what is contemplated in this plan) is very different from one in which Joe Biden was President and his Democratic Party controlled Congress (the dynamic during the January 6th hearings). I believe we have a tendency to over-index from individual electoral outcomes, and give short shrift to the public and political value of sustained fight, particularly when we are out of power. As I often note, Democrats right now are the opposition party, and we must act like it.

Republicans get this. They used the power of investigations and oversight effectively during the 118th Congress, when they controlled the House but Democrats controlled the Senate and the Presidency. Republicans held 63 hearings attacking the Biden Administration’s policies across nearly every committee in the House. The House Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, issued more than 91 subpoenas alone, to individuals and organizations ranging from Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland, to University presidents, to Meta and Google. Through these hearings, Republicans were able to help shape the narrative around the 2024 Presidential election. They identified issues such as immigration and economic security to pressure Democrats, and did so relentlessly. In 2026, if Democrats win back the House, we should take the lessons learned from this strategy and apply them to our own investigative game plan.

To that end, if and when Democrats win the House back in 2026, we have an obligation and responsibility to strategically deploy oversight power. From the Trump administration’s actions to withhold appropriated funds, launch military hostilities without the consent of Congress, accept Cava bags filled with cash, and arrest and detain innocent American citizens, Trump and Congressional Republicans have given Democrats an endless list of matters to probe. We must organize around a few guiding investigative themes and leave no stone unturned using committee hearings and subpoena power. Through aggressive oversight and investigations, Democrats can:

• Check the Trump administration’s lawlessness by making clear that illegal activity and corruption will be investigated, and by spurring criminal prosecutions or impeachments;

• Focus the American public on the illegal and corrupt activity that gets lost in the daily barrage of news and distraction out of the White House; and

• Shape the narrative of the 2028 elections and help Democrats win back the White House and grow our majority.

But this should not be an improvisational exercise. Democrats should have a ready roadmap for the use of House investigative and oversight authority ready if and when we take the majority. This plan is my draft of that roadmap.

Issue: Illegal Foreign Military Hostilities

1. Hearing: The Unconstitutional Capture of Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela

   1. Background: In the early hours of January 3rd, President Trump led a military attack on Venezuela in which U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him to NYC to face trial on narcoterrorism charges. The extensive bombing campaign involved in Maduro’s capture, which put American forces in harm’s way and cost taxpayers over $600 million, was undertaken without regard to the Constitutional division of war powers that dictate that only Congress has the authority to declare war. Attempts by the administration to frame the kidnapping of a foreign leader as a “defensive” response, or as a law enforcement apprehension, are risible. Rather, by the administration’s own admissions, the goal of the hostilities was to “take back oil” and to prompt a regime change, while the “U.S. will run the country” for the foreseeable future.

   2. Goal: Democrats should use this hearing to bring light to the grave abuses of power of the administration in the attack on Venezuela, and the flimsiness of its pretextual rationale. As Trump threatens increased military strikes around the world, from Mexico to Iran, investigating the lack of Congressional involvement in the capture of Maduro will set an important precedent: abide by the War Powers Resolution, or face legal action.

   3. Committee: House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Armed Services Committee, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. military leaders involved in the strikes, war powers legal experts.

2. Hearing: Illegal Airstrikes on Marine Vessels in International Waters

   1. Background: In the past several months, the Trump administration has launched several airstrikes on ships it has alleged are trafficking drugs in the Caribbean Sea and the East Pacific Ocean. As of December 31st, at least 115 people have been killed in the strikes, which have been backed by few details and evidence. Additionally, video uncovered by the Washington Post has shown a second strike launched on an already-destroyed vessel in early September, which killed two defenseless survivors that had been clinging onto wreckage. The airstrikes have been executed with no clear legal basis, and several experts have argued they are a violation of international law and may constitute war crimes.

   2. Goal: Democrats should use this hearing to investigate whether the Trump administration is indiscriminately killing people abroad, including innocent civilians. The hearing will determine whether the threshold of “imminent threat of violence” is met by the ships, a claim used by the administration to justify military force as opposed to criminal proceedings. Evidence from the investigation will make clear whether there is a basis to impeach Secretary Hegseth and other key senior officials.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Foreign Affairs, House Armed Services Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, U.S. military leaders involved in the airstrikes, threat assessment experts, international law experts.

Issue: Immigration

1. Hearing: The Department of Homeland Security’s Inhumane Practices in Immigration Courtrooms

   1. Background: ICE officers have targeted legitimate asylum seekers by asking judges to prematurely dismiss noncitizen immigrant court cases. As soon as a case is dismissed, ICE agents, waiting outside of courtrooms, arrest individuals and prepare them for expedited removal. This strips immigrants of their ability to appeal case dismissals and intentionally hamstrings due process to fast-track the deportation process.

   2. Goal: Highlight the inhumane and inefficient tactics ICE is using to hit arbitrary quotas. Particularly in these scenarios, these are not individuals who have broken any laws, contrary to Republican messaging. In fact, they are trying to work within the system to legalize their permanent status. This process tears apart families and dangerously undermines a foundational American principle: due process.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Committee on the Judiciary.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Stephen Miller, DHS Stakeholders (Homan, Noem, Lyons), Individuals affected by this policy, American Immigration Council subject matter experts.

2. Hearing: Excessive Use of Force by ICE Agents

   1. Background: As ICE agents infiltrate and terrorize cities across the country, there is a growing body of video footage capturing their excessive use of force on immigrants and citizens. On January 7th, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. Additionally, there have been multiple reports in New York of ICE officers at 26 Federal Plaza attacking reporters and family members of those detained. There is disturbing video footage of an ICE officer, who was initially put on leave but has since been reinstated, violently pushing a woman to the ground. There has also been footage of ICE tear-gassing and dragging an American citizen and Army Veteran out of his car.

   2. Goal: Democrats should subpoena ICE agents’ body camera footage, and force Republicans to answer for this administration’s dangerous, excessive use of force on both the individual being detained and bystanders.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Committee on Homeland Security, House Committee on the Judiciary.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Victims of excessive force, ICE agents, DHS officials (Noem, Lyons).

3. Hearing: Perilously Incompetent or Intentionally Cruel? ICE Arrests of Citizens and Non-Criminal Immigrants

1. Background: According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 71.5% of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction. In addition, ProPublica found that immigration agents had detained 170 American citizens. These are by no means the “violent criminals” that Trump was promising to “keep off our streets.”

2. Goal: This hearing should hold ICE accountable for breaking the law and detaining U.S. citizens. It should also highlight the false narrative that Republicans are pushing about arresting dangerous criminals.

3. Committee: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Committee on Homeland Security, House Committee on the Judiciary.

4. Potential Witnesses: U.S. citizens arrested by ICE, DHS officials (Noem, Lyons), ICE agents who have made false arrests.

4. Field Hearing: Legality of and Safety at ICE “Detention Facilities”

   1. Location: NYC: 26 Federal Plaza, LA: B-18

   2. Background: At federal buildings across the country, such as 26 Federal Plaza in New York and B-18 in LA, ICE agents are detaining and housing individuals in conditions that have been described as “cruel and inhumane.” In these facilities, there are reports the detainees “were forced to sleep on the floor” or were “sitting upright, and were deprived of showers, sufficient medical care and legal representation. Some migrants said they had to contend with a stench emanating from shared toilets, which were in plain view of other detainees.” A judge has already ordered ICE agents to improve conditions at 26 Federal Plaza. Meanwhile, we recently learned that 32 people died while in ICE custody over the course of 2025.

   3. Goal: Hold these hearings on-site or as close to on-site of these federal holding facilities as possible to expose these horrific circumstances. Congress has a right to conduct oversight of these facilities and investigate their conditions. This investigation can support future and ongoing legal action.

   4. Committee: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Committee on Homeland Security, House Committee on the Judiciary.

   5. Potential Witnesses: Previous detainees at these facilities, DHS officials (Noem, Lyons), constitutional lawyers to discuss potentially unconstitutional conditions.

Issue: Affordability

1. Hearing: Skyrocketing Energy Prices

   1. Background: Since Donald Trump became president and worked with Congressional Republicans to repeal clean energy tax credits and destabilize the wind and solar energy, energy prices have gone up. This trend will only worsen as demand for energy continues to grow. According to federal data, energy prices are up 5.1% compared to a year earlier.

   2. Goal: As Democrats shape the narrative around the 2026 agenda, Democrats should continue to expose Republicans as the party that increases prices and drives down affordability.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Energy and Commerce, House Committee on Natural Resources.

   4. Potential Witnesses: State Regulators, Renewable Energy Developers and Investors, Economists, Department of Energy and Interior officials.

2. Hearing: The Cost of Trump’s Misapplied Tariff Policy for Small Businesses

   1. Background: Donald Trump’s poorly applied and vindictive deployment of tariff policy has led to higher prices and more uncertainty for small businesses across the country. Goldman Sachs, as reported by Fox News, completed an analysis that showed that U.S. businesses were bearing the brunt of Trump’s tariff policy, absorbing 51% of the costs. The Federal Reserve of Atlanta also published data that shows that 86% of U.S. companies that import their products by sea — in other words, those that would be affected by the reckless tariffs — have 50 or fewer employees. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that small businesses will face a $202 billion “tariff tax”.

   2. Goal: Expose Trump’s reckless tariff policy as a tax on American businesses, particularly small businesses, in some cases driving them out of business.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Small Business.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Small business owners, economists, Federal Reserve representatives.

Issue: National Security

1. Hearing Series: The Defense Department’s Unauthorized Use of Signal and the Inclusion of a Reporter in What Should Have Been a Classified Discussion

   1. Background: In March 2025, Atlantic Reporter Jeffrey Goldberg reported that he had been added to a group chat with Secretary Hegseth, Michael Walz, and other senior members of the Trump Administration, outlining imminent plans to bomb Houthi targets. The messages were on Signal and were set to “disappear” after a certain amount of time, which is illegal. Not only does this call into question the basic competence of senior administration officials, it is also almost certainly a violation of multiple laws.

   2. Goal: Investigate which laws were broken, the security norms that were breached using this form of communication, the risks it posed, and the sensitivity of information that was relayed to the Atlantic reporter who was accidentally added to the group. This can lead to a series of hearings and can extend further if there is reasonable evidence that this use of Signal happened more than once. This hearing series should be used to assess whether to impeach Secretary Hegseth and other senior officials.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Armed Services Committee.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Subpoena and request comprehensive records from all members of the group chat (including senior aides and assistants), Jeffrey Goldberg, national security subject matter experts on privacy law and defense security rules and procedures.

2. Hearing Series: Oversight of DOGE and Its Misuse of Highly Sensitive Data

   1. Background: DOGE employees forced themselves into sensitive government databases, accessing highly personal information on American citizens housed at agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Health and Human Services. More recently, DOGE announced a plan to build a centralized database that marries data from the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, HHS, and the IRS together. Reporting suggests they are building out this database with Palantir.

   2. Goal: This series of hearings should investigate the extent to which DOGE’s actions violate the Privacy Act of 1974 and to understand how the Trump Administration is using that data to illegally spy on and track immigrants and citizens.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Elon Musk, Palantir executives, DHS officials (Homan, Noem, Lyons).

Issue: Corruption and Rogue Rule

1. Hearing Series: Trump’s Illegal Impounding of Funds and the Effect It’s Had on Communities and Nonprofits

   1. Background: Trump’s administration has attempted to withhold or cancel nearly $410 billion in previously-appropriated funds from going to nonprofits and communities. Recent analysis from right before the government shutdown shows that these funds are not all for international aid programs, and include funds for programs such as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Disaster Funding, the Office of Electricity, and more.

   2. Goal: Highlight the disastrous effect this illegal directive has had on our federal agencies, communities and local nonprofits across the country. Subpoena for all documents and memos regarding the administration freezing or cancelling these funds.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Appropriations, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

   4. Potential Witnesses: Officials from federal agencies working on affected programs, stakeholders from the community who are no longer receiving funds, employees at OMB.

2. Hearing Series: Trump’s Weaponization of the Federal Government

   1. Background: Since they regained power in 2023, Congressional Republicans have tried and failed to claim that President Biden and Congressional Democrats were “weaponizing the federal government.” Trump, on the other hand, has prioritized a campaign to use the power of the federal government to prosecute his political enemies. Using the resources of the DOJ to go after James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff, Trump has gone so far that he is having a hard time finding attorneys who are willing to abandon reason and the rule of law to comply with his intimidation and retribution crusade. America also agrees that Trump is misusing his power here. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 52% of respondents agreed that Trump is “using the U.S. Justice Department to file unjustified criminal charges against his political opponents.”

   2. Goal: Highlight Trump’s blatant abuse of power in using federal resources to go after his personal enemies.

   3. Committees: House Judiciary Committee.

   4. Potential Witnesses: DOJ employees from the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, former interim U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, who resigned after refusing to bring a criminal case against James and Comey.

3. Hearing: Homan Cash Grab and FBI Investigation

   1. Background: In September 2024, Trump’s now-border czar Tom Homan was being investigated by the FBI under suspicion of trading favors from the president for cash. The FBI got a tip about this behavior and staged an operation where they posed as business executives and offered Homan $50,000 in return for political capital. According to reports, Homan accepted the cash. The FBI investigation was dropped under President Trump.

   2. Goal: Subpoena Homan and the FBI for all records of this operation. This hearing should help uncover what the terms of the transaction were, where the money currently is, and what directives the FBI was given to drop the case. The American people deserve transparency into what appears to be blatant public corruption.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Homeland Security, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Homan, FBI agents involved in the case, DOJ and FBI leadership, Trump-Vance transition team members responsible for closing the investigation.

4. Hearing Series: Demolition of the East Wing

   1. Background: On Monday, October 20, 2025, under orders from President Trump, demolition of the East Wing of the White House began. Like so much conduct by this administration, it is not clear that appropriate permits were obtained, relevant organizations were consulted, or if artifacts and records — property of the American people — are being properly archived. At the time of the demolition, the administration did not have approval from the National Capitol Planning Committee, and it is unclear whether they have it now. This hearing will expose the President for his selfish, brash, and potentially illegal directive to tear down one of the most iconic and important pieces of physical American history. It is also important to understand the details of how the project is being privately financed.

   2. Goal: Investigate the circumstances in which these actions were taken and demand transparency for the American people. The White House is not a Trump Hotel, and he must not be allowed to treat it as such.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

   4. Potential Witnesses: Diane Sullivan (Director of Current Planning Division at the National Capital Planning Commission), leadership at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Commission of Fine Arts.

Issue: Trump’s Self-Enrichment Schemes

1. Hearing Series: Trump’s Use of His Official Office to Self-Enrich

   1. Background: In a thorough and detailed investigative analysis into how much Trump and his family are profiting from the presidency, David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker concludes that across Trump’s many ventures, the number was close to $3 billion before the end of the first year of the administration. This includes everything from his personal merchandise store and hotel properties to his crypto scams and the gifting of a Qatari jet. This hearing series should cover each and every one of those conflicts of interest and clearly outline that the President’s commitment to his personal profit far outweighs that of his commitment to the interests of the American people. It should also aid lawmakers in reforming presidential ethics laws.

   2. Goal: This series should be considered the most accurate and up-to-date accounting of Trump’s obvious conflicts of interest, his violations of the emoluments clause, and the many other gross breaches of ethics he has committed. Where there are loopholes, hearings should help lawmakers determine how to strengthen existing law.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

   4. Potential Witnesses: President Trump, Bill Zanker (Trump’s business partner that oversees Trump’s NFT), Zak Folkman and Chase Herro (Trump’s business partners who run World Liberty Financial), Zack Everson (reporter on Trump’s hotel empire), Jared Kushner.

2. Hearing: Reverse Robin Hood — Donald Trump Stealing from the American Public for his Personal Gain

1. Background: This hearing could be a series, with multiple examples of how Trump has exploited his position for personal gain, but one stark example is the report that the president demanded that the DOJ pay him $230 million to compensate him for previous cases against him. Not only is this a completely blatant case of corruption (these cases were duly opened and investigated), it came during a government shutdown, when his party failed to pay federal workers and right after Trump threatened Medicaid and SNAP for many Americans through H.R.1.

2. Goal: Subpoena DOJ employees and White House officials familiar with this demand from the president to highlight how deeply corrupt it is that the senior leadership in charge of making this payment to the president is made up of attorneys and officials he politically appointed.

3. Committees: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

4. Potential Witnesses: DOJ employees, White House officials.

3. Hearing Series: Trump’s Corrupt Crypto Empire

   1. Background: Trump’s crypto empire is perhaps the most lucrative and egregious example of his corruption in the White House. Trump has used the crypto industry to curry political favors and self-enrich both through the sale of his own coins and tokens to everyday consumers, and by soliciting campaign payments in exchange for pardons and fewer regulations on the industry. Trump has now pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who pled guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws in 2023 and recently used Binance to boost the value of Trump’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin. He has also granted clemency to Ross Ulrich, who operated a crypto dark web drug site and he pardoned Arthur Hayes a crypto leader who had also pleaded guilty to money laundering.

   2. Goal: This hearing series should investigate everything from Trump’s conflict of interest in promoting policy he is using to get rich, to the parties he is throwing for his memecoin investors, to what he is receiving from individuals he’s promising to pardon. The hearings should also aim to investigate if foreign governments are influencing the president through his crypto holdings. His egregious crypto corruption is less well known than his other antics and this hearing should highlight just how deep it goes.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Financial Services, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Pardoned crypto CEOS, Trump family members with cryptocurrencies, Bill Zanker (Trump’s business partner who oversees Trump’s NFT), Zak Folkman and Chase Herro (Trump’s business partners who run World Liberty Financial), Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump.

Issue: Democracy

1. Hearing Series: The Trump Administration Actions to Dismantle Federal Agencies and Politicize the Federal Workforce

   1. Background: Since the start of his Presidency, Donald Trump has targeted, gutted, and even entirely eliminated federal agencies. He began by empowering the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to terminate thousands of federal employees. More recently, his OMB director, Russ Vought announced plans to lay off thousands more federal workers under the guise of the government shutdown.

   2. Goal: This series of hearings should cover everything from the chaotic and reckless way that DOGE entered the federal government, to the loyalty tests now being administered to new hires, to the decrease in services and resources available to the American public as a result of these minimized workforces. It should also cover Trump’s moves to fire nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with his political lackeys. This should include the dismantling of the Department of Education, USAID, CFPB, and more.

   3. Committee: Every House Committee with relevant federal agency jurisdiction should hold a series of these hearings. When finished, it should paint a comprehensive picture of the Trump Administration’s assault on every agency from USAID to the State Department.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Former non-partisan federal workers who were laid off, DOGE employees (ie. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, Kyle Schutt, Ethan Shaotran, Luke Farritor, etc).

2. Hearing: Censorship under the Trump Administration

   1. Background: In late July 2025, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was abruptly cancelled. There was speculation that the Trump Administration was pushing CBS/Paramount to censor Colbert’s historically anti-Trump rhetoric. The cancellation happened just a few days after Paramount settled a lawsuit with the president, agreeing to pay him $16 million and as the company was in talks with the FCC to allow a merger with Skydance in an $8 billion deal. In September, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Jimmy Kimmel made a benign joke about the Republican Party after Charlie Kirk’s death.

   2. Goal: Subpoena executives at the relevant media companies as well as FCC Chair Carr to understand exactly how these decisions were made and to hold them accountable for potentially violating the First Amendment. House Democrats should also probe witnesses to gather evidence and assess if federal bribery laws were broken.

   3. Committee: House Committee on Energy & Commerce, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

   4. Potential Witnesses: CBS, Paramount, ABC, and Disney Executives, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, FCC Chairman Carr.

Issue: Public Safety and Health

1. Hearing: The Safety of Tylenol (Acetaminophen) During Pregnancy

   1. Background: In September 2025, Secretary RFK Jr. announced that HHS was going to issue a notice to physicians and start requiring Tylenol to change its labels because of a false and deeply misguided belief that Acetomenophin, the primary active ingredient in Tylenol, leads to conditions like autism. Not only is this type of nonscientific assertion threatening for pregnant women, it also sets a dangerous precedent that the NIH can choose to misinterpret or outright ignore scientific data in pursuit of politically motivated outcomes.

   2. Goal: Convene doctors, scientists, and other experts in medicine to testify to the safety of the drug. This is important to reassure the American people that their pain management options are safe and to hold RFK Jr. and the Trump Administration responsible for their false and dangerous rhetoric.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Energy and Commerce, House Committee on Oversight of the Federal Government.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Doctors and scientists who have researched the drug, CDC and NIH officials, subject matter experts from countries with similar safety standards (ie. U.K., Canada, etc.).

2. Hearing: Undermining Vaccines and Putting Americans in Harm’s Way

   1. Background: Secretary RFK Jr. has spent his time as head of HHS calling into question the efficacy and safety of vaccines. Not only is this extremely dangerous, it is a flat-out lie, being dangerously evangelized by the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. This rhetoric has led to multiple large measles outbreaks across the country, leading to the death of two children and total cases hitting a 34-year high this summer.

   2. Goal: Hold RFK Jr. accountable for the direct negative impact he has had on public safety, including the death of two children due to measles. Make it clear that anyone in his position should be sharing information cautiously and thoughtfully, with scientific evidence.

   3. Committees: House Committee on Energy and Commerce, House Committee on Oversight of the Federal Government.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Affected community members, doctors, RFK Jr. and HHS employees.

3. Hearing: The Deployment of the National Guard to Democrat-Lead U.S. Cities

   1. Background: The President has deployed the National Guard to several major cities led by Democrats, including Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, New Orleans, and Memphis. Trump has argued this dramatic escalation is a response to rising crime rates and civil unrest, as well as an effort to eliminate “the enemy within.” The Supreme Court recently determined that the National Guard deployments, executed in spite of opposition from local leaders, were a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement. While the President responded by dropping the use of the National Guard in major cities in the short-term, he stressed that it is “only a question of time” before they return “in a much different and stronger form.”

   2. Goal: Establish, with clear evidence, that deployments of the National Guard to cities against their will is illegal and not to resume in the future. Anticipate and dispel future legal arguments likely to be used by the Trump administration in this effort, including the unjustified invocation of the Insurrection Act.

   3. Committees: House Judicial Committee, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, House Committee on Homeland Security.

   4. Potential Witnesses: State and local officials targeted by National Guard deployments, Attorneys-General who successfully filed for their cessation, law enforcement experts to show that the deployment was unnecessary, civil liberties experts.

4. Hearing: The Trump Administration’s Attacks on Gun Safety

   1. Background: Immediately upon taking office, Donald Trump began to pursue an agenda to roll back gun safety legislation and dismantle the systems that keep Americans safe from gun violence. Within hours of his inauguration, he disbanded the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. He followed this up by cutting over $800 million worth of local grants to gun prevention and crime reduction programs, purging hundreds of thousands of records from background check databases, and making it easier and cheaper to buy dangerous gun accessories like forced-reset triggers and silencers. These policies have made all Americans less safe in their communities.

   2. Goal: This hearing will expose the danger of the Trump administration in the realm of gun violence. As annual gun deaths near record highs, an investigation into the systemic dismantling of decades-long gun restrictions will clearly show that Trump is a threat to public safety in every sense of the term.

   3. Committees: House Judiciary Committee, House Committee on Homeland Security, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

   4. Potential Witnesses: Law enforcement professionals, victims and survivors of gun violence, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) senior officials, CDC experts.

In just the first nine months of his presidency, Donald Trump, aided and abetted by the Republican Party that he now controls, has wreaked havoc on our communities. He has weaponized immigration enforcement to round up and tear apart families, often detaining and brutalizing immigrants — and, in some cases, American citizens — who are playing by the rules. He has turned 26 Federal Plaza into an illegal detention center, allowing little to no oversight by Congressional leaders, while empowering his masked ICE agents to continuously use excessive force.

Trump’s so-called “America First” energy policy has proven to be nothing but a pretext to fill the coffers of his oil and gas donors while systematically dismantling and attacking safe, clean, renewable energy sources, like wind and solar. And his irresponsible and crudely imposed tariffs on foreign goods and products have led to higher costs and fewer jobs, as companies raise prices and cut labor costs to absorb the monetary hit from what amounts to a massive tax increase.

And with his One Big Beautiful Bill (OB3), Trump passed the most punitive piece of legislation for working people in American history. The bill explicitly trades nearly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other social benefit programs — all while increasing the national debt by $4 trillion. Families making $24,000 or less will lose $1,200 per year, while those making $700,000 or more will gain $13,600 per year from tax cuts.

This attack on healthcare and food programs cannot be understated. For millions of Americans and New Yorkers, Medicaid and SNAP can be the difference between life and death. By targeting cost-sharing agreements, implementing work requirements, and shrinking the Medicaid program, the bill leaves two million New Yorkers at risk of losing their health insurance coverage, with 1.5 million anticipated to become uninsured. Additionally, 300,000 New York households are expected to lose their SNAP benefits. According to a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the bill will lead to at least 51,000 otherwise preventable deaths annually.

The Role of Congressional Democrats

In all of this, Trump relies on loyal and pliant Congressional Republicans. OB3 passed thanks to the cooperation of Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and every single Republican member of Congress. Either active or passive assent from Republicans in Congress, on a unanimous or near-unanimous basis, has been a key enabling feature of Trump II.

The other piece of this equation is the expectation that Congressional Democrats will be unable or unwilling to stop administration actions, or at least slow things down. But while there are, undoubtedly, real limitations on the power of the House minority to stop the majority, there is more that Congressional Democrats can and should do to throw sand in the works. We are the opposition party, and we must start acting like it.

In fact, voters are practically begging Democrats to do something, anything to stop or slow this aggressive Republican wave of power. According to a poll published by the Wall Street Journal in July, the Democratic Party’s popularity is the lowest it has been in three decades; 63% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the party. Voters are wholly unconvinced of the party’s ability to understand, represent, and deliver for them. Even compared to Donald Trump, whose favorability ratings are consistently low, Democrats are seen as an uninspired and tired resistance force. Our brand has been diminished to one of exhaustion and defeat, and we must show voters that we have the political foresight and the sheer will to earn back their support.

Putting up effective roadblocks to Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, exposing Congressional Republicans’ complicity, and shifting the country away from reactionary revanchism towards an era of progress requires a multi-pronged, comprehensive strategy that relies as much on political shrewdness as it does creative policymaking.

As part of my campaign to represent New York’s 12th District in Congress, I am publishing a series of plans that, together, will detail a comprehensive approach to fighting back. I will cover what Democrats in the minority should be doing now (and what they should continue doing in the unfortunate event that we do not regain control of the House in the mid-terms), how we can leverage power if we win back the House to restore the broken pieces of democracy, and finally, how we can deliver a proactive, forward-looking policy agenda that the American people can believe in.

This first plan in the series focuses on tactics that Congressional Democrats right now can use, or use more, to slow Trump’s agenda and make it as painful as possible for Republicans to do the President’s bidding.

Strategy 1: Force Congressional Republicans to Vote on Controversial Trump Directives

As President, Trump has aggressively exercised executive power to advance his agenda. He has used executive orders to unleash the power of his office to declare war on immigrants, kill renewable energy projects, deploy the national guard into Washington, D.C., and arbitrarily impose sweeping tariffs on countries from Canada to Japan. While the legality of this use of executive power is being litigated in courts across the country, Congressional Democrats can force Republicans to vote explicitly on these individual actions.

While Republicans have a range of tools at their disposal to block unwanted legislation from hitting the floor for a vote, they have no control over what Democrats introduce and, in some cases, they are statutorily required to allow for a full chamber vote on certain bills or resolutions.

Specifically, House and Senate majorities must allow for full chamber votes on “privileged resolutions.” And — highly pertinent to Trump’s abuse of executive power — joint resolutions to overturn an emergency declaration under the National Emergencies Act are privileged. In other words, Democrats can force Republican members of Congress to vote on some of the most controversial moves of the Trump Administration.

This tactic has been used in a few instances, the most recent of which was related to the “national energy emergency” Trump declared in order to provide subsidies to the oil and gas industry while undoing many of the benefits the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided. The IRA, passed under President Biden, was a once-in-a-generation piece of legislation that simultaneously spurred domestic energy production and helped to jumpstart an economic and workforce development boom across the country. Importantly, the bill ushered billions of dollars of investments into Republican districts. In fact, over half of the clean energy projects catalyzed by the IRA benefitted Republican-held districts, including a $100 billion investment in NY-22 represented by Republican Rep. Brandon Williams.

But since Trump has taken office, with the help of Congressional Republicans, nearly 40,000 jobs and over $21 billion in investments have been lost in Republican districts across the country. Energy bills are up 10% across the board, with the biggest increase hitting Missouri, whose constituents will see their annual utility bill grow by $561 on average.

In response, on February 3, 2025, Senators Tim Kaine and Martin Heinrich introduced a resolution to terminate Trump’s national energy emergency declaration. The resolution was put to a vote in the full Senate and was defeated 47-52 along party lines. They then introduced the same resolution eight months later on the same issue, forcing Republicans to once again vote against their constituents, who are facing skyrocketing energy and utility costs.

We should use this strategy far more frequently to force Republicans to choose between the most aggressive parts of the Trump agenda and the interests of voters. Trump has declared a number of national emergencies through executive order — one at the southern border, economic security emergencies, and an energy emergency. Speaker Johnson has surreptitiously used the House Rules committee to thwart Democrats’ ability to use this tactic by passing legislation to “stop” the counting of calendar days required for a bill to gestate before it can be considered by the full House. His tactics, however, only derail House Democrats’ ability to force votes on overturning Trump’s tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada.

Democrats in the House should immediately introduce resolutions to force Republicans to go on the record blocking votes to terminate Trump’s national energy emergency and overturn Trump’s tariffs on EU countries and Japan. (Speaker Johnson had also tried to stop Democrats from doing this, but the relevant provision expired on September 30, 2025. A similar joint resolution recently passed the Senate with Republican support on October 30th, 2025.)

Strategy 2: Divide the Republican Caucus with Discharge Petitions

While the use of joint resolutions to overturn emergency declarations is a great tool to show Americans who is and is not on their side, there is another set of issues and a different tool — the discharge petition — that can pry individual Republicans away from their party. The House continues to have both rogue and vulnerable Republican members, and we should use the discharge petition to divide them from their party and force all Republicans on the record.

The discharge petition is an element of parliamentary procedure that, if supported by an absolute majority of members (218), requires consideration of a piece of legislation by the full House. This allows a bill or resolution to bypass normal committee deliberation and bars leadership from blocking a vote. At the time of this writing, there are 214 Democrats sworn into the House of Representatives; to deploy this tactic effectively, Democrats therefore need to find issues that might attract the support of at least (or just) four Republicans.

The power of this tool has been underscored by the discharge petition to release the Epstein files, sponsored by Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA). The push to release the Epstein files and reveal those who participated in his abhorrent conduct is so politically potent that it causes division within the Republican Party. As a result, the petition attracted four Republican signers and reached 218 when Rep. Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in. It now appears that Republicans will be forced to take a vote on a simple question: what’s more important, protecting Donald Trump or holding child sex abusers accountable for their heinous crimes?

For as long as Democrats are in the minority, we should be searching for wedge issues that divide Republicans and file discharge petitions to force votes on the record.

Strategy 3: Throw Sand in the Works With More Frequent Use of the Rules Committee Process

Trump and his handmaidens in Congress are moving quickly, and speed is part of their strategy. The faster they move, and the faster they are able to jam bills through the legislative process, the less time the American public has to fully digest the consequences.

House Democrats, unlike Senate Democrats, don’t have the filibuster as a blocking tool, but they do have a complex set of governing rules that structure the way the chamber operates, and which can be used — far more than is happening right now — to slow down the Republican legislative machine. A key mechanism to do this is through the procedures of the House Rules Committee (Rules).

Rules is a unique but vital step in the House’s lawmaking process. The committee is made up of 13 members, overwhelmingly stacked against the minority; the current committee consists of nine Republicans and four Democrats. For a bill to be considered on the floor and passed by a simple majority, it must first make its way through Rules. Rules deliberates on each bill and, most important, reviews and evaluates amendments that are submitted to each piece of legislation.

Both parties can submit an unlimited number of amendments, and each member is entitled to up to five minutes in front of the committee to make their case. If each one of the 213 Democratic members of the House used their full time, that would translate into 1,065 minutes, or 17.8 hours, that Democrats can use to argue against a bill, delaying it from hitting the floor.

This strategy was used during the fight against OB3. Both times that the bill came to Rules, Democrats submitted more than 200 amendments, forcing debate well into the early hours of the morning. They highlighted their opposition to the contents of the bill itself, the rushed manner in which it was being pushed through Congress, and helped sow even more chaos within the Republican Party as the vote drew near.

There is no reason a similar approach shouldn’t be used with even the least consequential pieces of legislation, to slow the Republican agenda to a crawl.

Strategy 4: Slow Republicans Down Using the “Magic Minute” Speech Procedure

Another tool that Democrats in the House should use more frequently is the “magic minute.” This procedural rule allows the Speaker, the Majority Leader, and Minority Leader to object to a bill on the House floor by claiming time to speak against it. While dubbed the “magic minute,” it actually allows for unlimited speaking time, providing Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries with the ability to substantially slow down and delay the legislative process.

Nancy Pelosi used the magic minute in 2018, when Democrats were in the minority in both the House and the Senate under the first Trump presidency, to speak for over eight hours on the House floor in opposition to a Trump directive that ended certain protections for Dreamers. In 2021, then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy beat the Pelosi record for time by close to 20 minutes, in a speech against the Inflation Reduction Act.

More recently, Minority Leader Jeffries used his magic minute to deliver a record-breaking eight hour and 45 minute speech on the impact OB3 will have on everyday Americans. He shared hours of testimony from Americans across the country who were going to lose healthcare coverage, access to food stamps, and more. While the bill eventually passed, it gave Democrats a platform to stall passage while making a case to the American public.

While the magic minute has historically been used rarely and in high-profile moments, it should be used with greater frequency — combined with the Rules Committee process discussed above — to throw sand in the works, slow down the speed with which the Republicans can move their agenda, and draw attention to what they are doing.

Strategy 5: Do Not Provide Any Votes to the Republican Majority

This last one is so simple — and, to me, self-evident — that it’s strange to call it a strategy: as long as the Democratic Party is in the minority — and particularly as long as Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House — we should provide no votes that have the effect of allowing the Republican agenda to advance; doing so only confuses the question of who is responsible for the damage and unpopular policies being driven by the Trump Administration.

Opposition parties play a vital role in functioning democracies: as an intrepid force that shines light on the actions and shortcomings of the party in charge, offers an alternative vision, and uses all of the tools at their disposal to stop or mitigate damage. Successful opposition parties operate in unity.

As Democrats fight the Trump regime, they should be doing absolutely nothing to assist it. Cooperation not only runs counter to the vital policy questions at stake — and misunderstands the nature of the modern-day Republican Party — it muddies the question of accountability and the choice facing voters the next time they go to the ballot box.

It should be said that the Democrats have failed to play this role in critical moments. The decision by Democrats to save Republicans from themselves by providing the votes to end the recent shutdown, without delivering anything in return that could be clearly explained to the American people, is the most recent and high-profile example. Earlier this year, 16 of Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions were confirmed with bipartisan support, including Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Michael Waltz — even after his unlawful use of Signal became public. These agents of Trump should not have been given the imprimatur of a single Democratic vote.

An opposition party is only as strong as its weakest link, and voting for these nominees, or bills that cede power to the administration, should be the sole responsibility of the party in the majority. While these votes took place in the Senate, the same principle applies to the House — and unity in the latter will shore up unity in the former.

Our message should be clear: Trump and the Republicans control every part of the United States government. Any action — or inaction — in Washington is under their full control. We Democrats stand in firm and united opposition.

Blue-state Attorney Generals have well-established processes for developing and collaborating on multi-state legal action, and they are heroes of our time for putting their offices to work to stop some of the most pernicious actions of the Trump regime. Governors, too, have channels of communication and mutual support that are getting more use than ever on issues from redistricting to the deployment of federal officers into our nation’s cities.

But coordination among legislators from different states is harder to organize for a number of reasons: there are so many of us; there is no clear point-person in each state; and the policy and political dynamics — not just of each state, but specific to and within legislative chambers and conferences — tend to be sui generis.

In the face of this, a number of strategists and organizations have focused on fostering free-flowing dialogue and idea-exchange among state legislators focused on responding to Trump. (Shout-out to The States Project, strategists Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight, and State Futures.) These efforts — advanced through group chats, Zooms, and in-person convenings, and bolstered by generally ad hoc but serious legal and policy explorations — have produced a growing body of state legislation that aims to expand state power to protect laws, liberties, and programs that our constituents depend on.

This is critical because there is no blueprint on the shelf, and no single source of expertise on state legislative countermeasures to Trump’s policies. The reality is that the imagination of Trump and his people when it comes to harm and malfeasance exceeds — at least in speed and scope — the capacity of individual legislators to develop effective and smart responses.

The task of developing “Trump-proofing” legislation is made more difficult by the fact that the issues and laws involved vary widely: an effective response to one Trump action is not simply tweaked to respond to the next; generally, an entirely different strategy must be devised. And limitations on state power — whether deriving from the Supremacy Clause and federal preemption, or immunity afforded to federal officials — must be reckoned with when writing state bills.

As a result, this project benefits enormously from lots of different people in different places pursuing different paths, and comparing notes along the way. Ideas crop up and spread in unpredictable and idiosyncratic ways — but they do so much more frequently when the people involved are engaged in active dialogue. Each of the bills that I’ve introduced to fight back has its own origin story — and many of them emanated from conversations with other legislators and activists who also wake up each morning horrified by Trump’s latest.

All of this is a perfect and important example of Justice Brandeis’s characterization of states as laboratories of democracies. And it’s (finally) picking up some steam.

Last week, I had the privilege to participate — along with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman, and Florida representative Anna Eskamani — in a nationwide zoom on this topic, organized by a coalition of groups committed to the defense of the rule of law. In preparing for the discussion, I realized that New York now has a rather large body of anti-Trump bills that have been introduced. In service of advancing the national conversation about state-level countermeasures, I thought it would be useful to catalogue what’s currently on the board, which I’ve done below. (My apologies, in advance, to any colleague whose bill belongs on this list but has inadvertently been omitted; I am happy to make additions.)

I have found it a useful heuristic when thinking up Trump-proofing initiatives to group them into one of three categories: bills that expand state authority in areas where Trump is disabling the federal government; bills that protect the rights of New Yorkers from hostile federal or red-state action; and “jiu-jitsu bills,” which in some way aim to turn the tables on Trump and his allies, either by making them pay a price for their actions or otherwise turning them to our advantage.

My experience has been that the first category of bills has been the easiest to advance through the legislative process — because they operate within existing structures of law and policy, are consistent with the Democratic Party’s historic commitment to strong government institutions, and do not raise political questions that are controversial in swing districts.

Rights-protecting bills, particularly on immigration, have proven more difficult, largely because of the politics in parts of the state that are far, both geographically and ideologically, from my district on the Upper West Side.

The bills that most aggressively go after Trump are the hardest — not because there isn’t a broad appetite to take him on, but because these bills tend to be unorthodox in construction and because the legislature is not in the habit of passing bills (at least knowingly) that may not stand up to a legal challenge.

In general, I believe that just as Trump breaks another norm every day as he establishes an autokleptocracy, we Democrats must continue stretching further beyond our comfort zone in fighting back. That has been the animating principle of my push to amend the State Constitution to allow New York to do a mid-decade redistricting in response to Texas: my regrets about abandoning the principles of independent redistricting in my state are dwarfed by my concerns that we may never again have a competitive nationwide contest for control of Congress.

But I believe this willingness to jettison traditionally self-imposed limitations on action also must apply to the political risks we are willing to take and the legal questions we are willing to test on every issue and every bill if it has to do with Trump. We are not only in a fight for our democracy but a race to save it, as well — and the faster we come to peace with pushing the envelope, the better shot we have of winning in the end.

Bills that Expand State Authority

Bill number: A.4040A/S.4067A

Title/Description: Codifies federal “disparate impact” standard in state saw.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Kavanagh

Notes: This bill responds to Trump’s attack on the legal doctrine that is critical to enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Bill number: A.8016A/S.7494A

Title/Description: GRIFT Act: Establishes new tools for state-level enforcement of securities fraud.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Gianaris

Notes: This bill responds to Trump’s gutting of the SEC and gives financial fraud whistleblowers an incentive to report crimes to state authorities.

Bill number: A.8427A/S.8416

Title/Description: FAIR Business Practices Act: Expands the authority of the State Attorney General to take action on corporate misconduct and consumer protection.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Comrie

Notes: As with the GRIFT Act and securities fraud, this bill responds to Trump’s gutting of federal consumer protection efforts.

Bill number: A.8590A/S.8034A

Title/Description: Expands the protections of the New York State Labor Relations Act to employees that are not covered by the National Labor Relations Board.

Assembly Sponsor: Bronson

Senate Sponsor: Ramos

Notes: This bill aims to ensure that, in instances where the NLRB narrows its jurisdiction or ceases to function, the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively will remain protected in New York.

Bills that Protect People and their Rights

Bill number: A.3506A/S.2235A

Title/Description: New York for All Act: Prohibits, except when required by law, the use of public resources for immigration enforcement and various forms of cooperation by state and local governments with immigration authorities.

Assembly Sponsor: Reyes

Senate Sponsor: Gounardes

Notes: This bill aims to ensure that state and local authority is not used to aid and abet Trump’s deportation campaign.

Bill number: A.4181/S.316

Title/Description: Dignity Not Detention Act: Prohibits state and local government agencies from entering into agreements with ICE to detain individuals.

Assembly Sponsor: Reyes

Senate Sponsor: Salazar

Notes: This bill aims to ensure that state and local facilities are not used to aid and abet Trump’s deportation campaign.

Bill number: A.5373A/S.4735B

Title/Description: Prohibits unauthorized immigration enforcement actions in school settings.

Assembly Sponsor: Cruz

Senate Sponsor: Sepulveda

Notes: This bill requires schools to bar access to immigration authorities acting without a judicial warrant.

Bill number: A.5480C/S.4914B

Title/Description: Shield Law 2.0: Expands the universe of providers of reproductive and gender-affirming care who are protected from criminal or civil liability or professional sanctions imposed by outside jurisdictions.

Assembly Sponsor: Bronson

Senate Sponsor: Hoylman-Sigal

Notes: This law builds on earlier legislation enacted to protect New York from legal incursions by red states aimed at chilling the provision of care.

Bill number: A.6596A/S.6377A

Title/Description: Requires Medicaid to cover gender-affirming care, regardless of federal funding, and prohibits discriminatory practices related to gender-affirming care.

Assembly Sponsor: Rosenthal

Senate Sponsor: Hoylman-Sigal

Notes: This bill would ensure that New Yorkers can continue to access gender-affirming care regardless of coercive efforts by the Trump Administration to impede access.

Bill number: A.7410

Title/Description: Prohibits lawsuits against librarians who refuse to remove library materials.

Assembly Sponsor: Rosenthal

Notes: This bill aims to protect librarians who stand up to efforts to censor and limit access to library materials.

Bill number: A.7777/S.1099

Title/Description: Freedom to Read Act: Directs the State Education Department to develop policies to ensure that school libraries and library staff are empowered to curate widely varied collections.

Assembly Sponsor: Simone

Senate Sponsor: May

Notes: This bill aims to ensure that school libraries in New York are not subject to censorship efforts that have taken hold elsewhere.

Bill number: A.8139/S.4121

Title/Description: Protects people from civil arrest while within one thousand feet of a sensitive location.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Jackson

Notes: This bill aims to create spaces that are off-limits to ICE without a judicial warrant, including health care facilities, schools, shelters, houses of worship, and elected officials’ offices.

Bill number: A.8908/S.8462

Title/Description: Prohibits law enforcement officers from wearing masks in the performance of their duties.

Assembly Sponsor: Simone

Senate Sponsor: Fahy

Notes: This bill aims to end the practice of ICE agents concealing their identity as they whisk people off the streets of New York.

Bill number: A.8977

Title/Description: Prohibits bail enforcement agents from enforcing immigration actions.

Assembly Sponsor: Rosenthal

Notes: This bill addresses concerns about the use of bounty hunters as extensions of ICE.

Jiu-Jitsu Bills

Bill number: A.8096/S.7153

Title/Description: DOGE Act: Directs review of tax subsidy deals with Elon Musk and Tesla.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Hoylman-Sigal

Notes: This bill, which may have limited applicability outside of New York, aims to review and potentially revoke a wasteful tax subsidy deal with Tesla.

Bill number: A.8097/S.6915

Title/Description: RECOURSE Act: Authorizes the state to withhold payments to the federal government in the event that the federal government violates a court order and holds up money due to the state.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Ramos

Notes: This bill, which was inspired by a bill introduced in Maryland, is one of the most aggressive Trump-proofing bills out there.

Bill number: A.8187/S.7716

Title/Description: BRIDGE Act: Provides state pension credit for former federal employees.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Ramos

Notes: This bill would enable former federal employees, including those laid off by Trump, to come to work for the state and get pension credit in the state system.

Bill number: A.8241/S.8075

Title/Description: Tariff Transparency Act: Requires the disclosure of increases in automobile prices due to tariffs.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Cooney

Notes: This bill relies on existing disclosure documents to provide consumers with information about how much more they are paying for a new car because of Trump’s tariffs.

Bill number: A.8318B/S.7860B

Title/Description: Excludes hours worked by an attorney or applicant to the bar as part of an agreement with the federal government from pro bono reporting; prevents a law firm from requiring attorneys to work in service of such an agreement.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Hoylman-Sigal

Notes: This bill aims to reduce the opportunity for law firms and attorneys to benefit from cutting deals with the Trump Administration.

Bill number: A.8383/S.7823

Title/Description: Removes a requirement that the state follow recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunization against meningococcal disease.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Hoylman-Sigal

Notes: While not precluding the state from following CDC recommendations on vaccinations, this would eliminate the sole remaining requirement in law that it do so.

Bill number: A.8636/S.8173

Title/Description: Authorizes the state to place liens on federal properties in the event that the federal government violates a court order and holds up money due to the state.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Cleare

Notes: Like the RECOURSE Act, this bill was inspired by a bill introduced in Maryland.

Bill number: A.9014/S.8467

Title/Description: Amends the state constitution to authorize the state to redraw congressional district boundaries mid-decade if another state has done so first.

Assembly Sponsor: Lasher

Senate Sponsor: Gianaris

Notes: This bill enables New York to respond to Texas’s actions, at Trump’s behest, to redraw congressional lines mid-decade; unfortunately, because of the constitutional amendment process, it could not take effect until the 2028 elections.

Crafting and Advancing a Legislative Agenda

There were 9,000 bills introduced this year in the Assembly. Many of them address specific, technical issues. And many of these are, indeed, important. But at a time when the world — and our democracy — so often feels like it’s burning, I decided to focus on legislation that would have as broad and as substantive of an impact as possible.

That was my orientation as I headed to Albany in January. I set a simple “impact standard” for whether or not to introduce a bill: Does it meaningfully address a problem that a significant number of New Yorkers are concerned about — or, at least, would be concerned about if they knew about it?

I shied away from topics that were already well-covered by colleagues, and from bills that were too similar to other legislation already introduced. I did not pursue ideas that I did not believe had a shot, in the end, of garnering the support of the lion’s share of my Democratic colleagues, given the rule of thumb in the Assembly that any bill brought to the floor must be set to pass with votes from roughly 80 or more of the 103 Democrats in the house.1 And with the sweeping damage that is being done by the Trump Administration to the laws, liberties, and programs that New Yorkers depend on, I focused in particular on developing legislation that is responsive to what is happening at the federal level.

In the end, I introduced 34 bills this session. Roughly a third were aimed at fighting back against Trump. Many I wrote myself; others were written by State Senators who invited me to partner with them; several were introduced in previous years, sometimes with different specifics, by legislators who have since retired; a few were drafted by outside groups, a practice in Albany that has grown more standard than it should be; and in one notable instance I worked together with the State Attorney General to craft and advance legislation.

“Working a Bill”

A key piece of advice I got early on was that I would need to “work a bill” if I wanted it to pass. What that meant was that I couldn’t sit back and assume that the legislative process would take its course, with bills propelled by their merits — there is simply too much competition for the bandwidth of all of the players in our highly byzantine and idiosyncratic legislative process. The real path by which a bill becomes a law in New York is less Schoolhouse Rock and more a mix of improvisational jazz and whack-a-mole.

“Working a bill” roughly describes all the things a legislator can do to push a piece of legislation forward: lining up co-sponsors, generating positive media attention, meeting with Assembly staff to work through substantive and legal issues, lining up support from key advocacy groups, refuting objections or addressing them through amendments, responding to questions from Assembly colleagues, and pleading your case to those with decision-making authority.

It’s hard to do this for more than a few bills at once. I was further constrained by time: since the process of negotiating and passing the State budget this year consumed almost all legislative energy and attention through early May, the window for advancing legislation ended up as a six-week sprint before the end of the session in mid-June.

Another limiting factor: Almost all of my bills, if they ever reached the floor of the Assembly, were likely to be debated by Republicans. This is different from what happens with the majority of the bills that get votes, which are passed “on consent” — without debate. This meant that my bills would consume “floor time” — the scarcest resource of all in the legislative process. Given the need for the Assembly to balance the priorities of its many members, it’s a bigger ask and a heavier lift to get a vote on a bill that’s going to take up substantial floor time. My focus on introducing meatier bills, therefore, was also going to limit the number of bills I would be able to get over the line.

All of this, taken together with my status as a freshman legislator, meant that I had to set a handful of priorities and fight hard for them.

Triage and Just Keep Pushing

Each Assembly member is formally asked to submit a list of 15 priority bills, on which you get feedback from relevant committee chairs and staff and, with enough green lights, a vote at the committee level. Based in large part on the early feedback in that process, I was able to make a threshold judgment about whether, with limited time, a given bill had a chance of passage in this session.

For example, a number of my bills dealing with federal power raised questions about constitutionality, and I determined that those questions were unlikely to be answered to everyone’s satisfaction in six weeks. Other bills — such as one to create financial incentives for scaffolding to come down quickly, and another to expand the Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE) program — had potential fiscal implications for the City of New York’s budget. Without formal support from the mayor’s office, which I knew was not forthcoming, these were going to be a tough sell. Still others faced concerns from relevant committee chairs.

And so I narrowed my real priority list down to seven or eight bills that both met the moment and seemed like they had a shot. Everything would come down to the final five or six days of the session, during which the Assembly, often going late into the night, passes hundreds of bills. The toughest decisions facing the Assembly’s leadership about which bills get to the floor are often deferred until these final days. I knew that one of my bills, the FAIR Business Practices Act, which faced significant business group opposition, would be in this touch-and-go category.

And so, as that period approached, I focused like a laser on the FAIR Business Practices Act, feeling that if that bill, and only that bill, got done, I could feel good about the session. Quality over quantity. But I also knew that it might not make it, and so I woke up every morning in Albany thinking about what I could do that day to push each bill on my shortlist a bit further down the field.

When the dust settled, the FAIR Business Practices Act got done (with some significant concessions), and so did my bills on renewable energy, housing discrimination, and protections for rent-stabilized tenants. Each of these involved robust debates with my Republican colleagues, which I generally enjoyed. A number of other bills that I was invested in, sponsored by colleagues, also got done. And, of course, there were some real disappointments.

“Trump-Proofing” Consumer Protection: The FAIR Business Practices Act

I was proud to partner with Attorney General Letitia James and State Senator Leroy Comrie in sponsoring legislation to comprehensively update – for the first time in 45 years – New York State law on consumer protection and corporate misconduct. Our bill, the “Fostering Affordability and Integrity through Reasonable (FAIR) Business Practices Act,” aims to strengthen the Attorney General’s authority to stop corporate misconduct that takes advantage of consumers. It comes at a critical time, as the Trump Administration turns out the lights at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and shuts down consumer protection work at the Federal level.

The bill faced enormous opposition from various corporate interests, particularly in the financial services industry, that were happy to see the Federal government withdrawing from the work of consumer protection. They fought the FAIR Business Practices Act tooth-and-nail, and it seemed, even after we amended the bill in response to objections,2 as though they had us beat. We had a breakthrough in the final hours of the last night that the State Senate was meeting; it was so late, in fact, when Sen. Comrie brought the bill to the Senate floor, that the lobbyists fighting us had gone home and to sleep believing that it was dead and they had won. A few days later, I passed the bill in the Assembly in one of our final acts of the session.

Ensuring that Wind and Solar Energy Projects Can Move Forward

New York State has ambitious climate goals that we are struggling to meet, and we can’t build new wind and solar energy projects fast enough. On this issue, too, the Trump Administration is pulling out all the stops to halt progress.

One of the tools that Trump’s allies at the local level use to stop wind and solar projects is to tax them to death. Projects that aren’t economically viable don’t get built. That’s why I introduced legislation to resolve years of court battles and finally establish a consistent and predictable statewide tax assessment structure for wind and solar projects. The bill was supported by all the leading climate and renewable energy advocacy organizations, and was passed after a vigorous debate in the Assembly.

Protecting Fair Housing Enforcement in New York

President Trump is stripping away the Federal government’s capacity to take action against housing discrimination by repealing the legal standard — known as “disparate impact” — used to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (Fun fact: Trump was, himself, a defendant in one of the Federal government’s early fair housing enforcement actions, as a landlord in Brooklyn in 1973.)

While New York has laws prohibiting housing discrimination, those laws also rely on the federal disparate impact standard. Early in this legislative session, I introduced legislation to codify the disparate impact standard into State law, so that New Yorkers will continue to have legal protections from housing discrimination, come what may in Washington. This bill was passed by the Assembly on June 6th and by the Senate a few days later.

Expanding Protections for Rent-Stabilized Tenants

Several years ago, the Legislature passed into law a set of protections related to the “security deposits” that tenants pay to landlords when an apartment is first leased out. In general, these protections codified into law industry-standard practices to ensure that a tenant gets his or her security deposit back unless there is damage to the apartment.

The new law, however, did not apply to the roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. Together with Senate Housing Chair Brian Kavanagh, I proposed legislation to include rent-stabilized tenants in these protections, and it was passed this session.

Other Victories: Fighting Antisemitism, Protecting Worker Rights, and More

In addition to the bills I passed, there were other paths to change.

I worked hard during the State budget process (which, confusingly, is not confined to funding the state government but also involves significant policy-making) back in March and April, to advance important policy goals. I was a strong advocate for making thoughtful changes to the State discovery law so that — without diminishment of due process — our District Attorneys can more effectively do their jobs, and wrote bills that were adopted in the budget, and became law, to create a public revolving loan fund for affordable housing and to make it more likely that people with serious mental illness get the help they need.

And, at the end of session, I was also involved in advancing a number of bills introduced by colleagues:

• I worked closely with Assemblymember Nily Rozic on her legislation to require every college in New York to have a Title VI Coordinator: a centralized official responsible for enforcing civil rights protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and corresponding state laws. This legislation was spurred by and responsive to rising incidents of antisemitism on college campuses, but it goes further than that to protect the rights of all students to pursue their education free from harassment and discrimination.

• Together with Assembly Labor Committee Chair Harry Bronson, I helped write a bill that would expand the jurisdiction of the State’s Employee Relations Board to cover any group of employees that loses the protection of the National Labor Relations Board. This will ensure that basic labor protections and the rights of workers to organize remain intact in New York State.

• I co-sponsored legislation, also by Assemblymember Bronson, to expand State legal protections for medical professionals who provide reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care.

• I was a vocal advocate for the New York HEAT Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, which was a comprehensive bill to wean New York off our fossil fuel dependency. While I was disappointed that the bill didn’t pass (more on this below), I was pleased that we enacted an important component of it, to eliminate the legal requirement that all utility rate-payers have to cover the cost of new homes’ gas hook-ups (which has historically incentivized, at our collective expense, continued dependency on gas instead of transitioning to electric).

Disappointments on Immigration, the Environment, and Housing Supply

One of the most frustrating things about Albany is that it’s far easier to defeat a bill than it is to pass one. There were a number of things we didn’t do in Albany that left me — and many of my colleagues — frustrated and disappointed.

On immigration, the New York for All bill, sponsored in the Assembly by Karines Reyes, would have substantially limited cooperation between state and local authorities and ICE as it carries out a cruel and fascistic agenda that involves masked agents sweeping people up off the street. New York for All was the subject of a great deal of internal discussion and debate, and I spoke up as forcefully as I knew how in favor of action. But in the end it was not enough. There were other bills to protect immigrant New Yorkers — including legislation that I sponsor to make schools, hospitals, houses of worship, shelters, and certain other locations off-limits for civil arrest by immigration authorities — that also remained stuck in committee. Along with many of my colleagues, I am determined to keep up the fight.

We also did not act on the two most significant pieces of environmental legislation under consideration this session, New York HEAT and the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA). I was a proud co-sponsor of both of these bills. As mentioned above, we did pass a significant component of New York HEAT. But despite the herculean efforts of PRRIA’s Assembly sponsor, Deborah Glick, a fierce lobbying effort by industry groups carried the day. It is fair, I think, to say the bad guys won. For now.

And, for another year, the Legislature failed to take any meaningful action to increase housing supply in New York. Assemblymember Brian Cunningham’s Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act died on the vine. And a bill that I carry, which would merely require localities to publicly report their zoning requirements and how much new housing they have permitted, didn’t move out of committee. As I’ve written before, if we want to tackle the affordability crisis in New York, we need to build more housing, and a lot of it. At some point, the Legislature must be willing to break from a policy of total deference to local policies that effectively mean a freeze on new housing.

The Work Continues

There is much more that could be written about this session, but this report has already exceeded what any reasonable person would want to know.

I am filled with gratitude to my team members, who worked tirelessly with me to make all of this happen, while providing outstanding service to our constituents; to the leadership and staff of the State Assembly, who must keep an infinite number of plates spinning, and who nonetheless were unfailingly supportive and responsive; to my colleagues, who represent the vast diversity of our state with honor and intelligence, and who provided encouragement and advice to me throughout the session; and to the many constituents, activists, and advocates who pour their time and energy into pushing elected officials like me to be better.

I’ll close where I started: with my belief in the power and value of the legislative process, and my recognition of its flaws, both validated by my first session in the Assembly. Suffice it to say, there is plenty more to do next year, and I am looking forward to it.

Two aspects of the film make it a treasure. The first is its collection of candid recollections and untold stories from so many key players from the crisis. This was just in time: by my count, seven of the interviewees – Howard Rubenstein, Jay Goldin, David Dinkins, Dick Ravitch, Ira Millstein, Fred Ohrenstein, and Gabe Pressman – have passed away since they sat down to share their insights for the project.

In addition, Yost and Rohatyn, and their archival producer, Frauke Levin, executed a staggering excavation of contemporary footage, both of official proceedings that unfolded and of life in 1975’s New York. In a talk moderated by Ginia Bellafante after the showing of the film last night at the IFC Center, Yost and Rohatyn recalled going through rolls and rolls of film from news organizations and the Getty archive that contained unindexed and, probably, never-before-looked-at footage. (Interestingly, much of it came from the BBC, which explains why the best documentary I have seen on this topic prior to Drop Dead City was in fact, a BBC production, Nightmare in the City that Never Sleeps, which aired just a few times in the U.S., and which I have tried and failed on a few occasions to get a copy of.)

That footage shows a city that seems a distant cousin of the one we inhabit today. Its denizens were, as writer Thomas Beller said in the talk after the film, “almost a different species.” Different clothes, different haircuts, a far more pronounced and widely squawked New York accent, and even, Beller noted, “twentieth century teeth.” It was then, as it is today, a city with serious fault lines and divisions. But it was a time when New York’s working class was a dominant political force; when the cultural, economic, and geographic proximity between that working class and the managerial class a few rungs up the ladder was far closer than it is today; and when the city’s moneyed class was less stratospherically wealthy, less numerous, and less able — pre-globalization and pre-digital age — to move their money and their interests elsewhere. The result was a far greater sense of interdependency and shared interest in the city’s survival.

I couldn’t help but look to the past captured by the documentary for lessons about New York’s future (beyond, of course, the obvious: the importance of competent operational and fiscal management). Through that lens, I was struck by three parts of the DNA of the city in that era that have virtually vanished, and which I hope the next mayor can reclaim.

1. An expansive, liberal vision for what New York City could be. The fiscal crisis reached its nadir in 1975, but a full decade earlier, John Lindsay was running for mayor to lead a city in turmoil.1 Lindsay’s campaign message (expressed here in excerpts from his inaugural address) was not merely a promise to respond to and manage the significant problems of the day, but to deliver a city government far more actively involved and engaged in providing for the health, wellbeing, prosperity, and joy of its people. New Yorkers were excited by that vision and voted him in with high hopes. Of course, the verdict of history is that Lindsay managed to do none of this — or at least none of it very effectively — while setting the city on a course to bankruptcy. The result was the synonymity, since then, of a liberal urban agenda with fiscal doom, and the perceived mutual exclusivity of any such agenda from competent governance. But what might the verdict of history have been had Lindsay, and Robert Wagner before him, simply been better managers, with plans to pay for the things they wanted to do, and the discipline to execute well? Capacious urban liberalism, in retrospect, died with Lindsay and the fiscal crisis — no mayor since has won on a truly ambitious vision for restoring and expanding the physical and social infrastructure of the city. We are poorer, in all kinds of ways, as a result.

2. Active pride in, and attention to, the diversity of New York. David Dinkins famously and proudly noted that the city was less a melting pot than a “gorgeous mosaic.” While Drop Dead City leaves the racial and tribal tensions of 1975 on the cutting room floor, it shows us everyday New Yorkers and an array of leaders who, whatever their shortcomings, professed pride in that mosaic, and who also seemed to recognize that it was fragile and needed tending to. If liberalism died with Lindsay, that embrace of diversity disappeared with Dinkins, perhaps due to its associations with some of the most difficult moments of his mayoralty. But without a leader extolling and tending to the strength inherent in our differences, common understandings and bonds across the mosaic erode, and our social fabric frays.

3. A business community that is broad-mindedly engaged in the welfare of the city. The story that Drop Dead City tells in the main — that of government, business, and labor coming together to save the City from financial ruin — is a well-worn legend, and the film, appropriately, pokes some holes in the hagiography, from the difficulty of getting Al Shanker on board2 to the argument, more fully explored in Kim Fein’s Fear City, that bankers, in effect, staged a coup and imposed austerity on City government. It is also true that the financial sector, in particular, had an existential stake in the financial solvency of the City that has gone the way of the telex. But there was, undoubtedly, a deep sense of responsibility to New York on the part of a wide array of business leaders, some of whom — notably Felix Rohatyn and Dick Ravitch — were public servants who emerged as heroes and demonstrated a real sense of compassion and a broader view of the bottom line. It is hard to see who are, or could be, the Ravitches and Rohatyns of today. Mike Bloomberg, of course, filled this void, and then some, for twelve years. He managed to revive the confidence of the business community in city government and, to some extent, its supportive engagement in civic affairs. Bloomberg (the individual, the company, and the foundation) continues to be a massive New York City philanthropist, but the former mayor has generally and understandably withdrawn from the arena. In the twelve years since, the business community has grown more and more distant from the civic life of the city. I do not think that any one interest group should be driving policy, but neither is it healthy for New York’s biggest generators of economic output and employment to be on the city’s sidelines or in our peanut gallery. They will not stay there forever.

One aspect of Drop Dead City that was eerily parallel to the current moment was its chronicle of confrontation between Democrats in New York and a Republican administration in Washington that was prepared to see the city fail, led by a president who famously (though not literally) told us to “Drop Dead.” Today we face a regime in Washington that is not only willing to see the city fail but will, I believe, set about to make that happen. What turned the tide with Gerald Ford in 1975 was a willingness by New York leaders to unify and fight, and in a different fashion, we must do the same today. (More on this in a future piece.)

The current mayoral administration has been such a managerial mess that much of this year’s campaign conversation has centered, appropriately, on restoring public confidence in City government. I have written before about why that is critical, also, if we are to cede no further electoral ground to Trump here in New York. But it is testament to how withered our view of City government has become — not just over the last four years but over the last fifty — that competence alone would seem like a quantum leap forward. This is a beggarly portion.

A competence that is also capable of thinking in big and compassionate ways, of restoring pride in diversity as one of our city’s great assets, and in rebuilding the faith and investment of business leaders in New York’s future — that is what the world’s greatest city truly deserves.

I confess I feel a certain strangeness about celebrating a new and exciting chapter in public life at exactly the same time as we face unprecedented threats to our most important public institutions.

With that in mind, I think of this evening as an official kickoff, of sorts, of my efforts to use whatever power attaches to my office, and my voice, to figure out how, in this challenging environment, we can protect and meet the needs of the people who call New York, and the West Side, home.

I have tried not to waste a minute in Albany.

My proposal for a revolving public loan fund to build middle-income housing was incorporated into the Governor’s budget. So, too, was my proposal with Senator Hoylman-Sigal to help ensure that people with serious mental illness get the care that they need.

At a time when civil rights are under attack in Washington, I am committed to protecting them here in New York. That’s why I introduced legislation to ensure the continued enforcement, in New York State, of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — even if, and almost certainly when, Donald Trump shuts it down at the federal level.

And it’s why, earlier this week, I announced the ACCESS Act — to get our colleges and universities to be more serious about preventing and responding to discriminatory harassment. I have a particular concern about the rise of antisemitism on campus, but this bill would protect all students from being targeted based on their identity.

And as Trump and Musk and their minions embark on a deregulation crusade that would make Ronald Reagan blush, I am proud to announce this evening that I am taking on sponsorship in the Assembly of the “Consumer and Small Business Protection Act.”

This sweeping legislation would give our State Attorney General the power to protect New Yorkers from unfair business practices, just as the lights are being turned off in Washington at the CFPB, DOJ, and SEC. The bill has languished for years, but working with Attorney General Tish James, I am determined to make this the year we get it over the finish line.

Along the same lines, I’ve got a bill to strengthen the Attorney General’s hand in prosecuting securities fraud, and a bill to go after large multi-national corporations that are evading New York’s corporate income tax — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — at the same time as Donald Trump is shredding international agreements to stop global tax evasion.

This community has always sent representatives to Albany who were willing to take on the rich and the powerful, and it’s time our biggest corporations pay their fair share.

More locally, I’ve got a bill to establish residential parking permit systems, to ease the pain of parking for local residents, a bill to limit how much SCRIE and DRIE recipients have to pay in rent, a bill to help District Attorneys and the NYPD meet the obligations of the discovery law, and a bill to get the damn scaffolding down.

I’ve rallied with activists to speak out against Trump’s immigration cruelty, walked the picket line with striking teachers at the Manhattan School of Music, and pressed the Commissioner of Environmental Conservation to move faster in pursuit of the State’s climate goals.

So, that was the first six weeks.

Twenty years ago, people said I was a young man in a hurry. I am not so young anymore. But I am still very much in a hurry.

And I will need the help of every person in this room — your passion, your energy and your grassroots organizing skills — to get this agenda across the finish line.

* * * * *

All of this, I see as part of the work that we must do to save what I call the New York Project.

The underlying thesis of New York is that millions of people can be thrown together in extremely close quarters and, not in spite of their differences but because of them, create a uniquely desirable and dynamic place. New York isn’t just a city in which to live, or work, or visit, it is a grand social experiment and a remarkably successful one — a testament to the notion that we are stronger together.

The reality is that the New York Project has been under great strain since the pandemic. Many New Yorkers lost their faith in the capacity of government to deliver effective services and a safe city, not without reason.

Some of those New Yorkers left — more than we should accept or be comfortable with. Others, in frustration, shifted their vote to elect a President who, along with his allies in Congress and in the media, aims to take the challenges we already face and add a slew of new ones, including weaponizing and withholding federal dollars, to tear away at our social fabric, and prove that the diversity, compassion, and generosity of New York will be our doom.

Just this morning, the cover of the New York Post says it very succinctly: U.S. vs. N.Y. That is what is going on here. If it said, “Trump to New York: Drop Dead,” it would be too passive.

We cannot let this succeed — we must save the New York Project.

That requires us to do two things at the same time.

First, we must be aggressive, creative, and strategic in figuring out how the State and the City can step in when the Federal government steps back, and in fighting every step of the way against the attacks in Washington against New Yorkers.

At the same time, we must be equally aggressive, creative, and strategic in working to restore the faith of New Yorkers in Democratic governance, and in making New York City a shining alternative to Trump’s dystopian vision: a city that is well-run, and safe; with world-class public spaces, and dependable public transit; a place where it is affordable to live and raise a family.

If Trump’s answer to government and policy failures is less government and less policy, our answer is better government and better policy.

But we must be able to deliver, and to do so in the most practical and concrete ways, including — and especially — for the lion’s share of New Yorkers who don’t see things through the lenses of political activism or interest group politics.

The goals of fighting Trump, and of getting our own house in order — these are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are inextricably linked. Only if we restore the confidence of New Yorkers in their government, will we have the ongoing economic and political strength to defend our values from Trump’s onslaught.

And only then can we ensure that the New York Project will survive and thrive long after the fraudster in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is gone.

* * * * *

Ed Koch had one of my favorite lines about politics.

“If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me,” he said. “If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”

This is the West Side — no two people in this room are going to be in accord 12 out of 12 times. And we wouldn’t want it any other way.

We won’t always agree, but you can count on me to come to my positions honestly and independently, and to always be direct — sometimes to a fault — about where I come out on any issue. I will fight hard for what I think is right, and even harder for this community.

In two years’ time, I hope the faith that each of you has placed in me will be validated not only by the 9 out of 12 issues where we were on the same page, but how I handled the 3 out of 12 where we were not.

* * * * *

A little more than a year ago, Elizabeth and I went to see the holiday show at Phoebe’s elementary school, P.S. 166 — another great public school in the 69^th Assembly District.

Over the course of the preceding fall, P.S. 166 had enrolled a meaningful number of students who were new to this country.

Mr. Shackman, the music teacher, and Mr. G, the drama teacher, take great pride every year in working with their students to put on original musical productions in each grade. Last year, for the 2^nd graders, Mr. G and Mr. Shackman decided to write a show that would toggle between English and Spanish.

Performing it required those children who did not speak Spanish, like Phoebe, to learn enough Spanish to sing all the lines, and asked the same of those students who were new arrivals when it came to the lines that were in English.

Watching the show, called “Abuela,” it was impossible to tell who had been born and raised in this country and who had arrived just weeks earlier.

All of these children had been crowned princes and princesses of the city.

This magic had happened in a public school building, because of the commitment and ingenuity of two teachers.

It happened because of investments our government had made in that school and in those teachers.

It happened because of taxes we had paid to fund those investments.

It happened because of a school community that treated all of those kids like our own.

And in the long term, we will be stronger for it — because those kids, all of them, are the future of our city.

That day, in an auditorium just a bit smaller than this one, I saw New York at its best.

That is the New York Project.

That is what I am in government to defend — and advance.

That is what I’ll be fighting for every day, and every night.

It is the privilege of a lifetime to be able to do so.

Thank you.

I noted that in Tisch’s first seven weeks, New York City saw a 16.88% year-over-year reduction in major felonies — compared to a 6.54% year-over-year reduction in the seven weeks preceding her appointment. I posited that the NYPD had fallen into all manner of malaise and dysfunction, that there was a fair amount of crime-fighting leverage being left on the table, and that Tisch’s appointment and early days provided a much-needed jolt that was showing up on the streets and in the data.

Although the before-and-after data was pretty stark, my gut instinct, even as I wrote that piece, was that a statistical anomaly was more likely than this theory being proven out over time. Three more weeks of data, however, and the “Tisch Effect” seems to be going strong.

The last three weeks of CompStat data have shown year-over-year reductions in major felonies of 19.42%, 20.91%, and 12.29%, respectively. Looking the chunk of the calendar covered by Tisch’s first ten weeks, we’ve seen a year-over-year drop in major felonies of 17.11%. This compares to a year-over-year drop of 5.5% in the ten weeks preceding her appointment — and to a drop of just 1.89% for all of 2024 prior to her appointment.

Indeed, the inflection point really does seem to be right when Tisch was appointed. In the period beforehand, the percentage reduction, year-over-year, in major felonies committed per week hovered in the mid-single digits, with a drop of 6.51% in the last full week before she was appointed (ending 11/17/24). The first full week of her tenure (ending 12/1/24), the drop was 17.54% and it has since stayed in the mid- to high-double digits. The worst week in her tenure by this measure (a drop of 12.29% in the week ending 1/19/25) was still better than the best week in the ten pre-Tisch weeks (an 11.09% drop in the week ending 9/15/24).

This chart below shows the weekly year-over-year declines in major felonies going back to mid-September. It’s clear enough that I don’t even need to include a marker to indicate when Tisch took over:

My point in writing these pieces is not to sing the praises of Commissioner Tisch (although, at a time when New Yorkers have lost faith in government at all levels, for a range of reasons, it’s worth celebrating when government officials do a good job and produce results).

My point is that we shouldn’t forget, or underestimate, the connection between how well the NYPD is being run and how safe our city is. Indeed, there are strong incentives on both the right and the left to ignore that connection. There are conservative voices that aim aimed to hang every crime committed in the five boroughs on criminal justice reform policies and efforts to end mass incarceration — even when that means turning a blind eye to the effects of running the police department as a patronage and overtime mill. At the same time, many on the left are happy to criticize the NYPD and its leadership while refusing to entertain any discussion of building the department up, or even to acknowledge the connection between policing and crime reduction.

Every week that the Tisch Effect continues, and the NYPD demonstrates that old-fashioned efficacy makes a difference, both of these obviously incomplete and reductive views of public safety should get harder and harder to defend.

Tisch’s appointment was announced on November 20, 2024, and she was sworn in on November 25. In the seven full weeks of data since Tisch took over (from the week ending on 12/1/24 through the week ending 1/12/25), 14,000 major felonies were committed, compared to 16,844 for the same period in 2023-2024 — a 16.88% year-over-year decrease.1

That 16.88% decrease under Tisch compares to a 6.54% year-over-year decrease in the seven full weeks prior to Tisch taking over (from the week ending 10/6/24 through the week ending 11/17/24), and to a 1.89% year-over-year decrease for all of 2024 through the last full week before her appointment.

The total incident rates for murder and rape are relatively small, so I am reluctant to draw any conclusions there. But the other five major felonies each have more than ten thousand incidents per year, making it less likely that changes in these numbers are statistical noise. Among them, under Tisch, we’ve seen:

• A 27.18% year-over-year decrease in robbery, compared to a 6.74% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 0.7% year-over-year increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.

• A 10.16% year-over-year decrease in burglary, compared to a 9.30% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 6.7% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.

• A 20.27% year-over-year decrease in grand larceny, compared to a 8.88% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 3.8% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.

• A 24.33% year-over-year decrease in grand larceny auto, compared to a 6.43% year-over-year decrease in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 8.9% year-over-year decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year.2

There also seems to be a clear shift in the trendline for several non-felonies that shape our sense of safety and disorder in the city: petit larceny, retail theft (a subset of petit larceny), and misdemeanor assault (which includes many stranger assaults that make the news when alleged perpetrators are released after arraignment). Under Tisch, we’ve seen:

• A 2.09% year-over year decrease in petit larceny, compared to a 3.57% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 0.7% decrease in the pre-Tisch calendar year. (This is a modest percentage shift, but in this category, the numbers approach or exceed 100,000 incidents annually.)

• A 3.94% year-over year decrease in retail theft, compared to a 6.09% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 4.0% increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.

• An effectively flat 0.21% year-over year increase in misdemeanor assault, compared to an 8.35% increase in the seven pre-Tisch weeks and a 9.4% increase in the pre-Tisch calendar year.

The causes of crime, and of fluctuations in rates of crime, are notoriously complex, and I am neither a criminologist nor a statistician. It remains to be seen whether this trend will hold, but to my layman’s eye, there is enough consistency here to at least wonder whether the new Commissioner has had an almost immediate effect on what’s happening on the ground.

How could that happen?

The answer would have to do both with the Department that Commissioner Tisch inherited, and how she has led.

The Department that she took over was, quite clearly, a mess at the top, and had been, more or less, from the start of the Adams Administration. Further down the ranks, the Department faced a growing shortage of officers that was bound up with huge morale problems. I have heard, anecdotally, that newer police officers who went through the Academy in recent years had a more passive conception of the job, inculcated with a sense that deterrence can be achieved merely through visible presence, rather than preemptive intervention. (It is a fair question whether that was in part a rational, or even appropriate, response to shifts in the public discourse and laws related to public safety.3)

It would make perfect sense that a culture of mismanagement at the top led to a lack of accountability throughout the ranks — and that this combined with a depleted, demoralized, and reticent corps of officers to meaningfully diminish the effectiveness and deterrent power of the Department itself, separate and apart from the impact of pandemic upheaval or policy changes made by the State Legislature, City Council, or District Attorneys.

In short, it is almost a certainty that the NYPD in recent years has been leaving some amount of crime-reducing potential on the table.

Enter Commissioner Tisch, like a hurricane. She is unlike any of her modern predecessors, combining the freedom to operate, speak her mind, and take on sacred cows that comes from independent means, years of experience in Ray Kelly’s and Bill Bratton’s NYPD, and a reputation for tirelessness and disruptive drive that most recently had brought about a transformation at the Department of Sanitation.

Before Tisch even walked into One Police Plaza, it’s reasonable to think that anyone almost anywhere within the NYPD who had been giving less than their all would read the press release announcing the new Police Commissioner and begin to sweat — or shift into higher gear. Transfers to Siberia loomed.

And as soon Tisch started the job, she moved almost instantaneously to reshape the Department, ordering 500 “hiding” officers back to crime-fighting, and making changes up and down the ranks:

Commissioner Tisch has begun to aggressively shake up the nation’s largest police department, from high-level commanders to patrol officers. She said in an interview that she had replaced nearly a dozen chiefs and deputy commissioners, including the head of the Internal Affairs Bureau.

“Every police car says ‘courtesy, professionalism and respect,’” she said. “The leadership of the Police Department has to model that. I’m very confident that that direction is now clear.”

If the NYPD was operating at far less than maximum efficacy prior to Tisch’s arrival, it seems entirely possible that her early moves had a swift and significant impact on the culture of the Department and the practice of policing in New York City — and that even if actual criminals have no idea who the Commissioner is, a more proactive, strategic, and focused police force may well have quickly exerted downward pressure on crime.

* * * * *

When discussing the issue of public safety in New York, and the meaningful increases in crime rates that we’ve seen since the pandemic, we can bucket causes into three categories:

1. Circumstances beyond the control of state or local government — e.g. pandemic upheaval or other broad, societal trends that show up in crime data from many different jurisdictions;

2. Operations of, and choices made by, those who play a role in administering our criminal justice system — e.g. police, judges, and prosecutors; and

3. Changes in law — e.g. bail and discovery reforms enacted by the State Legislature.

Those who are most hawkish about crime tend to focus primarily on the latter category — legislative policy changes, with additional criticism reserved for progressive DAs and judges. Depending on who’s speaking, this may variously be rooted in a serious assessment of the facts and data, anger and frustration about those changes in law, the fact that talking about operations is complex and unsatisfying, or a specific political agenda — or some combination of the above.

To be clear, I do believe that certain legislative policy choices have contributed to increases in crime. I think there is clearer data to support revisiting aspects of discovery reform than there is for bail reform. (As a practical matter, judges have retained broad discretion under the bail law, even though the statute is rather incoherent. At no time in the modern history of New York City were judges routinely sending shoplifters, even recidivist shoplifters, to Rikers; bail reform is not why your toothpaste is locked behind plastic.4) But an accumulation of State and City legislative policy choices are part of the reason that someone who commits a crime today in New York City — even a serious crime — both feels and is less likely to be held accountable, in any way, than they would have been five or ten years ago. It is reasonable to assume that this reduces deterrence, and that this, in turn, leads to more crime.

Whether the social costs of the elevated crime levels we are experiencing are outweighed by the social benefits — and perhaps, over some longer period time, public safety benefits — of less incarceration is the question that anyone engaging in this debate in good faith should be wrestling with. Neither side should get to pretend there are no tradeoffs involved.

But what the Tisch effect should remind us (even if it ends up being less stark than the early data would suggest), is that an analysis of crime and its causes in New York City that ignores the operational efficacy of the NYPD is missing a big piece of the puzzle — and that there’s a lot of leverage in making the Department run well.

This seems obvious, but I believe that the anger at progressive politicians throughout much of the law enforcement community over the last several years caused a kind of willful blindness — or, at least, silence — about what was going on at the Department and how it might be making New Yorkers less safe.

I found, in conversations with more conservative New Yorkers during my campaign last summer, that suggesting there should be operational improvements made at the NYPD — something that is in no way mutually exclusive of changing laws — often elicited a fierce defense of an obviously diminished Department and a suggestion that I was cop-bashing. Any argument that took any pressure off those bums in Albany and on the City Council could not be countenanced. It struck me as ironic that the very same people who were the biggest and most uncritical supporters of the NYPD were arguing, in effect, that nothing the Department did or didn’t do would push crime up or down. It is — also ironically — the same logic deployed by those on the left who argue that the outsize crime reduction in New York City in the 1990s and 2000s was simply part of a national trend and had nothing to do with the NYPD.

Along the same lines, those who should be most vigorously celebrating the new Police Commissioner’s apparent success in bringing down crime, without a single statute being changed, may be at least partly hoping that the Tisch effect is illusory. If it is real, it will be impossible to continue pretending that a reversal of criminal justice reform laws would be a panacea — or that crime reduction cannot be achieved without one. As a result, the public discourse around how to make us safer will be more honest and complete than it has been in years — and we will be that much closer to identifying and implementing the full array of changes and solutions necessary to bring crime down.

What is happening here is that opponents of the current specialized high school admissions process, having failed to win the day in the venue where this debate belongs (the State Legislature, which would need to repeal or amend the State’s Hecht-Calandra Act), have brought the fight to a venue where it certainly does not: a panel with functionally ministerial contract approval authority.1

There are a number of legitimate policy arguments implicated here, including whether to change a specialized high school admissions process that results in vanishingly few black and brown students at some of the most sought-after schools in the city,2 and just how much power should be given to a group of 24 obscure political appointees.

But treating the approval of a necessary contract as a proxy for those debates is grossly irresponsible and incoherent as a political strategy. What does success look like here for opponents of the SHSAT? No freshman class at Stuyvesant in 2026? Some cockamamie interim admissions process that the City dreams up to fill the seats, which would be in violation of State law and almost certainly enjoined? Is there any possible way this would lead to support for, rather than anger at, those whose efforts led to this outcome?

An op-ed in today’s Daily News reveals the game, and its limitations. The piece is, in effect, a bill of indictment against Pearson. Fair enough. (As it happens, I was Chief of Staff in the Attorney General’s Office when we took action against Pearson, resulting in a fine of $7.7 million, as referenced in the piece. I was fairly involved in that matter, and certainly carry no brief for the company.) But what is missing, entirely, is any suggestion of what happens if the dog catches the car and the PEP kills the contract. Either that’s because the author has no such plan, or because it’s a doozie.

This is policy by breakage. It’s deeply irresponsible, and the kind of thing we mostly see from Republicans who want to kill Obamacare or any efforts to tackle climate change. For right-wingers who don’t want a strong or trusted public sector, the collateral chaos isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

And so it is unusual to see policy by breakage from the left, but we do from time to time in New York, when there is a political consensus that falls short of a maximalist objective. I discussed this briefly in my post-election piece with regard to criminal justice policy. Advocates made a major mistake, both substantively and politically, when they set out not just to reform laws but to fundamentally break — including through budgetary deprivation — our system’s capacity to apprehend, prosecute, and appropriately sentence, or divert, people who commit crimes. Doing so has made us less safe and alienated no small number of New Yorkers who were sympathetic to the need for criminal justice reform.

An effective and broad public sector is a core tenet of FDR’s Democratic Party, and mine. It is a big part of what keeps us from the dystopian future of distrust and anger the Republican Party under Trump wants to bring about. It is also a big part of what makes New York, New York — a place where a spectacular range of people are able to live and thrive.

If we are to maintain support for the public sector — and the taxing and spending it requires — we must have the confidence of the people it serves. Robust debate, where everyone is heard, builds that confidence. Breaking things as a policy erodes it, and that’s not something that New York Democrats should have any patience for.

I did on Wednesday night. It is a strange and messy thing. But what it is, most of all, is a theatrical spectacle the likes of which you can only find — at least in the U.S. — in New York City.

Musicals are not what usually draw me to the theater. My preferred fare is straight plays, long and painful if possible. In that department, what New York gives us are the highest quality theatrical dramas you can see anywhere. (A plug here for the very fine Our Town, with Jim Parsons, at the Barrymore Theatre; I cried, more or less, start to finish.)

But there is something different about seeing the rare show (almost always a musical) that just couldn’t or wouldn’t be put on anywhere else — one that involves a magnitude of audacity and such feats of production that only New York can accommodate.

This struck me several months ago seeing Cabaret. The entire physical plant of the August Wilson Theater has been redesigned as the Kit Kat Club, and an elaborate pre-show swirls through the rooms and bars that have been built around the auditorium to create the feel of a Weimar-era nightclub. The performances themselves — in particular, when I was there, Eddie Redmayne as The Emcee — were perfectly over the top. Only in New York (domestically speaking) would producers make this kind of bet, and only here would audiences flock.

The same could be said of the recent, short Encores revival of Ragtime. Here the innovation was a lack of adornment in producing this sprawling (and previously over-produced) musical — relying instead on performers (particularly Joshua Henry) whose power blew the roof off of the large City Center theater and made for a deeply emotional performance at the scale of opera. There were multiple standing ovations throughout the show. It is hard to imagine pulling something like this off anywhere else. (Even here, the sheer size of the cast might make the economics of a full run impossible, but it would be a gift to Broadway.)

But Sunset Boulevard, working with the weakest material of the three, managed to reach the greatest heights of spectacle. The stark sets and costumes — all blacks and whites in a barren space with close-up video projected onto a massive screen — are mesmerizing. Nicole Scherzinger as the forgotten star Norma Desmond breaks the sound barrier with her performance, both figuratively and, in her show-stoppers, more literally.

It’s all stark, loud, mad. Tom Francis (who I can’t help but observe would have won the Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest in a walk), is excellent as down-on-his-luck writer Joe Gillis, cynical and noir and fatally trapped. The show’s title song, delivered as a set piece in which Francis and other cast members walk through a half dozen dressing rooms and then around the block, all captured by camera and projected onto the stage’s screen, makes almost no sense and is fantastic.

That’s my take on the whole thing. Lots of stuff doesn’t work. We are notionally in 1949, except everything feels 2024, except for the exchanges between Gillis and studio assistant Betty Schaefer, which are caricatures of 1949. I had difficulty understanding way more than my usual share of lines, and it’s not just because I’m getting older. Even the staging of climax, if you aren’t familiar with the plot, is lacking in some basic clarity, and at one point you are effectively blinded for ten seconds or so by a lighting cue — but also, it was wild. In general, the material itself is strange (and thin), and Jamie Lloyd and his cast doubled down, finding the outer boundaries of weird. Damn the torpedoes! — along with logic and coherence. They just went for it.

I couldn’t look away, not for one second. The sheer imagination of the production was as staggering as its execution. I walked out of the St. James Theater in bewilderment and awe, invigorated with the feeling: this is why I live in New York.

A disinhibited Donald Trump, unrestrained by Congress, has the tools to send an already fragile New York spiraling — by enacting policies hostile to our communities, by inflicting significant fiscal pain, and by perpetuating a dystopian caricature of life here, all of which together will have people and employers rushing for the exits. And so, therefore, along with the many people and aspects of national life that have been endangered by Donald Trump’s election to a second term, it is not an overstatement to say that the New York project itself is at grave risk. 

As we consider the antidote, it is important to acknowledge that the New York project was already under strain. A combination of governance failures and forces beyond our control — pandemic upheaval and global migration, chief among them — have dramatically diminished New Yorkers’ sense that this is, in fact, a great place to live. 

To put this in quantitative terms, the Citizens Budget Commission’s 2023 resident survey (taken between September and December 2023) found that just 30% of New York City residents rated quality of life in the city as excellent or good — down from 51% in both 2008 and 2017. This decline transcended demography, with a particularly steep drop among Hispanic respondents (presaging these New Yorkers’ outsize shift to Trump). The percentage of respondents rating government services as excellent or good dropped by half. So, too, did the percentage of respondents who said the City government spends tax dollars wisely. And New Yorkers in the survey said they felt substantially less safe than they used to, particularly in the subway at night. 

Consistent with this, between April 2020 and July 2022, New York City lost 468,293 residents, or 5.3% of its population; while some of these city residents moved to the suburbs or upstate, the state’s population loss more or less tracked the city’s in raw numbers. Departures have slowed, and international migration is up, but the trends have not reversed. The following year, we lost another 78,000 city residents. Just last week, a team of researchers at Cornell released projections of population decline; the middle scenario has the state losing another million-plus people by 2050. Outmigration has enormous economic consequences — in decreased output, property values, tax revenue, and federal aid — and can feed on itself as the critical ingredient in a feared “urban doom loop.”

In the presidential election, what’s ailing New York helped drive a shift to Trump by New York State voters that was greater than in any other state. Comparing the state’s 2024 and 2020 election results, President Biden’s margin of 2 million votes and 23 percentage points dropped to 920,000 votes and 12 percentage points for Vice President Harris. This 11-point shift to Trump was driven by New York City’s shift of 16 points. Obscured by important and high-profile congressional wins, New York State’s overall shift to Trump constituted 11% of the shift in the popular vote nationwide — almost twice New York’s share of the national population.

I am not of the view that Vice President Harris’s defeat, nationally, was the result of a specific failure of her, her campaign, or the Democratic Party. I’m with Michael Berube, who observes that in recent elections across the globe, “every incumbent party in every wealthy democracy paid a political price for presiding over post-COVID-19 inflation, whether they deserved it or not.”1 But agree or disagree with this, something more is going on here in New York. Discontented New Yorkers had been voting with their feet, and now they are voting with their votes — for a president poised to take our fraying social fabric and tear it to bits.

And so the ledger of New York exceptionalism has two rather dark new entries: as a place especially vulnerable to damage by the Trump presidency, and as a place especially susceptible to Trump’s appeal. Needless to say, these two things relate to each other paradoxically and dangerously.

That is why Trump-proofing must encompass both anticipating and mitigating the havoc his administration will wreak and addressing a set of legitimate concerns about conditions of life in New York that translated into a jump in support for his candidacy. The former has been a rallying cry for progressives since Election Day, while the latter is the priority of New York’s centrists, technocrats, and the ruling class. These are not mutually exclusive — to the contrary, they are intertwined and essential parts of what it will take to save the New York project in the age of Trump.  

Protecting New York from Trump Administration Actions

We must do everything we can to anticipate and respond to the violence Donald Trump will do to the laws, liberties, and diversity that are part of New York’s fundamental identity. Enshrining abortion rights and protections against discrimination in our State Constitution, as New York voted to do on November 5th, looks materially more important in light of our state’s sharp electoral shift to the right. The Legislature should continue to shore up access to reproductive healthcare, both for New Yorkers and for those elsewhere for whom our state may represent a last, best hope. Increasing Medicaid reimbursement rates for medication abortion seems like an obvious and necessary step. We will need continued creativity, by the State’s lawyers and by law enforcement, to stave off a proliferation of guns. And we should pass the New York for All Act, to protect New Yorkers, as best as we can, from what promises to be an incredibly cruel approach to Federal immigration enforcement. 

With Trump assembling a team comprising, quite literally, some of America’s worst people to achieve, as quickly as possible, Project 2025’s stated goal of “dismantl[ing] the administrative state,” we should expand the legal tools and resources available to New York State’s Attorney General to stop corporate malfeasance, to our Department of Labor to stop worker exploitation, to our Division of Human Rights to stop discrimination, and to our Department of Environmental Conservation to stop the degradation of natural resources.

And we should be prepared to backfill cuts by Trump to federal funding streams we count on. Just as the first Trump administration’s repeal of the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction was a stroke of malicious genius — funding tax cuts for the rich disproportionately from the wallets of taxpayers in a few states with expansive public sectors, and thereby exacerbating a sense of division between the people in blue states who depend on the safety net and those who pay for most of it — we should prepare for defunding of programs that aid New Yorkers most in need, from Medicaid to public housing to child care subsidies. The State will need to step in. 

But these actions, fundamentally defensive, will be insufficient to save the New York project from Trump if New Yorkers continue to move to his electoral column. Breaking this embrace before it takes a more permanent hold — or, I shudder to think, an intergenerational one — requires an agenda that swiftly and tangibly responds to the concerns of voters that we lost on Election Day in New York, one that begins to restore the value proposition of living in New York.

To be clear, this does not mean compromising on matters of principle. We should not — and need not — throw vulnerable people overboard in service of winning votes. It is by ending governance failures and solving real problems that we will deflate efforts to weaponize issues that have little actual effect on most people. We should also be better at placing the Democratic Party’s historic concern for abused and marginalized populations in the context of a big-tent approach to policy and politics, one that adds and not subtracts. Mario Cuomo’s brilliant framing, in 1984, of the difference between Republicans and Democrats is one we should return to more often: 

“The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail…. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.”

This should apply both to policy and electoral politics. But we have to show middle-class New Yorkers that they’ve got seats on the wagon train, too, and that we are competent to drive it. Only then will we move from a vicious cycle of election losses, distrust of government and each other, and strain on the New York project to a virtuous cycle of winning, unity and cooperation, and faith in government that can survive the Trump presidency.

Rebuilding Confidence in New York and Democratic Governance

A New York Times/Siena poll from October showed that New York City residents ranked the economy as their top issue in deciding the presidential race but crime as the most important problem facing New York City, prioritized by 27% of respondents. Voters understand, better than one might assume, the respective spans of control of federal, state, and local governments — but an agenda to win New Yorkers back to the Democratic column, from the top of the ticket all the way down, needs to engage with public safety, along with immigration and cost of living (which were ranked, respectively, as the second and third most important problems facing New York City).

On public safety, we Democrats need to speak about the issue in a way that bears some relationship to what New Yorkers see and feel every day.  That begins with acknowledging cold, hard data that shows that crime, in virtually every category, is up from pre-pandemic levels — not as much as the right-wing echo chamber would have you believe, but significantly and unacceptably.2

Vital City, one of the most valuable additions to the public discourse in New York in recent years, has put together a great data hub on crime data. Summarized here in mid-2024, major crime was up 32.2% from 2019 to 2023. Violent crime was up 29.1%. Property crimes that are also major crimes were up 33.4%.

And, yes, this can be true at the same time: New York is a remarkably safe city compared to its peers, and much safer than it was 20 or 30 years ago. But when New Yorkers say they feel less safe, it is not simply that they have the New York Post on I.V. drip. They are less safe. I have been amazed, in the course of many conversations, to learn how many New York Democrats who are elected officials, operatives, and activists are simply unaware (and skeptical) of this incontrovertible fact. If we are so badly informed, in denial about what everyday New Yorkers don’t need data to tell them, why on earth should they trust us on this most critical issue?

More than acknowledging the problem (soberly, sans hellscape hyperbole), we must have something credible to say about what we are going to do about it. Democrats in New York have gotten uncomfortable speaking about the police even as an ingredient in stopping crime. This is lunacy — and it’s simply not how most people think or talk about public safety. Conversely, oft-repeated rhetoric about root causes and long-term community investments may have substantive merit but sounds hollow when voters reasonably demand safety in the here and now. 

With all this in mind, it should be the immediate and vocal priority of city officials to rebuild the NYPD. The department is being run on overtime and morale has plummeted. Uniformed headcount is currently at a 20-year low, well below what the City Council-approved budget allows for. Without a blame game, the mayor — and/or those seeking to replace him — should articulate a plan to deliver for New Yorkers a fully staffed, better managed, and effectively deployed police department, one that New Yorkers see actively walking the beat and moving through subway cars. Part of this will undoubtedly involve lifting up wages and benefits that are far less generous than those of virtually every neighboring force. (I’ll put in a quick plug here for a program that Comptroller Brad Lander and I proposed, to help police officers and other city workers buy a home in the five boroughs.)

I start with this both because rebuilding the police force is a non-convoluted answer to elevated levels of crime, and because it is, in a sense, low-hanging fruit — by no means easy to accomplish, but far less substantively and politically difficult than resolving whether and to what extent criminal justice reforms passed in 2019 are contributing to the problem and merit further adjustment. Whatever one’s view on that question, reforms of bail and discovery laws were responsive to serious, longstanding, and racially discriminatory failures of the criminal justice system. But the conflation of these reforms with a blunt effort to starve and, in effect, break policing was self-defeating, both politically and substantively — and New York Democrats need to wash our hands of it. 

Along the same lines, Democrats need to move closer to the perspective of the average New Yorker when it comes to addressing serious mental illness playing out on our streets and subways. 

Advocates working in the mental health space will be quick to stress that most crime is committed by people who do not have mental health issues and that most people suffering from mental illness do not commit crime. This is true, and the mental health crisis demands comprehensive investment in the continuum of care. 

But failing to speak about and address the connection between serious mental illness and public endangerment is a condescending insistence on ignoring the lived reality of New Yorkers, in which people who resist getting needed help — no matter how many field outreach teams we send their way — are a constant and distressing fixture of a walk down the street or a ride on the subway. Public support for the kind of investment we need to make in mental health care professionals and infrastructure will, I believe, depend on whether or not we are willing and able to move the most serious cases out of the public realm and into care.

* * * * *

The influx of asylum seekers, and the political resentment it has clearly engendered, is to me the most difficult aspect of New Yorkers’ discontent to address. It is vexing because there are no easy answers (scale back the provision of shelter, for example, and you will increase the number of migrants sleeping rough), and because geopolitical instability and Federal policy are the drivers.3

It is facile to say we need to do more to connect newcomers to services, housing, and work so as to assimilate them as quickly as possible into life in New York. But I think this is right, and the only thing we can do. State and City governments should continue to expand and improve capacity in these areas, and as important, project confidence and competence rather than foment alarm. If we can do this while also responding to public safety and affordability concerns, I am hopeful that with the passage of time negative sentiment around immigration in this city of immigrants will abate.

* * * * *

The question of why voters didn’t feel the economic gains of Bidenomics is a leading subgenre in the digital pile of election post mortems. Here’s one that struck me as clear-eyed; put simply, high prices more than canceled out any sense on the part of Americans of expanded prosperity. Again, New York was exceptional, and not in a good way. While the CPI for urban consumers nationally rose 2.6% over the last twelve months, the equivalent measure for the New York area was 4%. Shelter (housing) costs increased for urban consumers nationally by 4.9%, but 6% in the New York area. More starkly, economists from Zillow and StreetEasy recently found that “New York City rents are rising seven times faster than wages” and that the “yawning gap between median rent and average wage increases in New York City outpaced that of every other metropolitan region in the country.” 

Over the long term, the most important thing we can do, by far, to relieve cost pressure on New Yorkers is build a lot of new housing. But there’s no fast way to make this happen: the political process to eliminate barriers to housing construction will itself take time, and then it will take time for a pipeline to develop (which will happen slowly until interest rates come down), and that’s before we even get to the building part. 

What we need now, while working on more structural cost relief, is a crash program to target immediate financial assistance to middle-class New Yorkers who don’t get much help from our traditional safety net programs.

Peak out-migration occurs right around the time New Yorkers have their first child, and we are hemorrhaging families with children (leading to the largest decline in public school enrollment in America). We should prioritize a substantial expansion of the State’s Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, a narrowly confusing add-on to the analogue Federal credit. The State has significantly expanded our child care subsidy (nearly doubling income eligibility to 85% of area median income, the maximum level Federal aid will support), but families just one rung up on the economic ladder, who are getting crushed by childcare costs, receive no support. Expanding and streamlining this credit could be a game-changer that doesn’t break the bank.

We should find similar vehicles to provide deeper relief to New Yorkers on their property tax and energy bills. Relief needs to be significant enough to be appreciable, and we should shout about it from the rooftops. 

We also must tackle property tax reform in New York City to reduce the disproportionate cost burden that currently falls on middle-class homeowners and renters. I’ve been back and forth on this over the years — worried about the fairness of changing the rules of the game in the middle, and about jarring financial impacts on those who will see their taxes rise. But there was no promise of immutability, and the rules are not presently fair. We should explore ways to phase-in increases, or defer them in part or full until properties change hands. But if we want to create lasting fairness and relief, it’s long past time for an overhaul. 

Taking on the Biggest Structural Threat to the New York Project: Our Housing Shortage 

What is needed in the short term — namely, rising to meet the intertwined challenges of protecting New York from the strain of Trump Administration actions and winning back voters from Trump’s column — is also what must be achieved in the long term to save the New York project for good. More than anything, this means remedying our decades-old failure to build sufficient amounts of housing to meet the demands of New York’s population. This issue, more than any other, represents a fundamental threat to New York, both substantively and electorally.

In the decade prior to the pandemic, New York City built just 27 new homes per 1,000 residents, a rate near the bottom of major U.S. cities. (By comparison, in that same period, Austin built 117 new homes per 1,000 residents; Seattle built 109; Washington D.C., 72; Dallas, 60.) Our suburbs have done even worse, with Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties each having issued fewer building permits per capita than all but one suburban county across New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. New York is creating a lot more jobs than housing for its workers; New Jersey and Connecticut are doing the opposite. Data emerging from the last several years shows no change in these trends. 

The result of this in New York City is an incredibly low vacancy rate (1.4%) and skyrocketing housing costs (up 68.4% from 2011-12 to 2021-22). In the rest of the state, things are not much better, with home prices up 50%-80%, and rents up 40%-60%, in major upstate cities between 2015 and 2022. In every region in the state, more than 40% of renters are cost-burdened (paying more than 30% of household income in rent), with higher shares in Long Island and urban areas. 

Both the progressive Fiscal Policy Institute and the centrist Citizens Budget Commission attribute a significant portion of our outmigration problem to the housing shortage. A study by McKinsey and the Regional Plan Association projects a shortfall of housing supply relative to demand of 935,000 units by 2035, and calculates that this shortfall will cost New York between $400 and $900 billion in cumulative GDP growth, 330,000-730,000 jobs, and $3.7 billion in state and local tax revenue.

That, in a nutshell, is the overwhelming substantive case for why New York desperately needs to jumpstart housing supply. The merits, unfortunately, have failed to overcome the politics of NIMBYism and the mantra of local control. I was proud to help craft Governor Hochul’s Housing Compact, which was proposed in her 2023 Executive Budget and crashed on the shoals of legislative opposition. It aimed to produce 800,000 new homes over a decade. The policies it advanced — housing creation goals for every locality, the creation of a state-level entity that can approve new housing when local officials consistently refuse, and multi-family residential development around transit hubs in which the State has invested billions — remain the right and necessary set of tools to dig out of the deep hole we are in.4

But if the idea of New Yorkers’ kids and grandkids being unable to afford to live in the state isn’t sufficiently compelling — if a picture of lost jobs, population, and money can’t persuade New York’s political leadership that this is a crisis that demands overcoming parochial opposition — perhaps the specter of electoral extinction can. That is the future that Jerusalem Demsas outlines in what is perhaps the most eye-opening post-election piece I’ve read, “The Democrats Are Committing Partycide.” Demsas’s central insight is to connect the failure of blue states to build new housing with the looming disappearance, through population loss, of so many congressional districts that it becomes far more difficult for a Democrat to win the Electoral College:

Remarkably, none of this happened by accident. A hostility toward population growth and people in general has suffused the politics of Democratic local governance….

In the days since Harris’s defeat, Democrats have defended Biden’s tenure by arguing that inflation was beyond the president’s control, or pointing to other economic accomplishments. But no Republican stopped San Francisco from building housing, and Trump is not responsible for New York City’s byzantine housing-permitting regime. (In fact, as I write this, New York is on the verge of watering down a proposal that would ease the construction of apartment buildings and smaller homes.) In the course of my work, I hear many policy makers and residents in blue communities lament their intractable housing crises, seemingly unaware that many places have solved a supposedly insurmountable problem. The only difference is those places are in states run by Republicans.

Demsas closes with a call to action:

It is not too late to reverse California’s stagnation—or that of New York and other expensive states. The cost of housing is quite literally a signal for how many millions of people would love to live in those places. Yet, in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, as several Democratic governors have telegraphed their intent to act as bastions of resistance in the coming years, none has focused on the issue that has most hollowed out the promise of liberal America. Nowhere in these headline-seeking pronouncements is a plan to address the housing and cost-of-living crisis or even a reckoning with the failures that produced the status quo. In part, this is due to Democrats’ failure to understand the link between their anti-growth policies at the state and local level and the national viability of their party. For years, Democrats have gotten to represent the growing, vibrant parts of this country and have become complacent, presuming economic dominance even in the absence of good policy. But last week’s results should not have shocked state and local Democratic policy makers—people have been voting with their feet for years.

We must read the tea leaves and heed this call. The New York project will not survive permanent inaction on this existential issue.

Uniting Democrats to Save New York

What this rough-hewn agenda requires is for progressives and moderates alike to summon energy to do things that might otherwise feel unimportant or even uncomfortable, but not fundamentally at odds with their convictions.

Progressives must care not only about standing up to Trump directly but also about undermining the strength of his movement in New York by addressing issues like diminished quality-of-life and high property tax bills. We need not abandon data-supported, righteous efforts to reform our criminal justice system in order to acknowledge real problems of crime and disorder and embrace solutions that any New Yorker on the street will tell you make common sense.

Moderates must lend their muscle to protecting populations and programs Trump will target in addition to worrying about conditions on their block. Along with funding more than the bare minimum when it comes to our infrastructure (a subject not addressed here, but critical to New York’s future), this will be expensive, and the business community will need to set aside a reflexive hostility to any new or increased tax, with an eye to retaining the city’s position as an unparalleled attractor of talent and generator of innovation.

Some of that hostility has been well-earned: advocacy efforts in recent years that seemingly aimed to raise money, first, and figure out how to spend it, second, did not inspire confidence among taxpayers that their dollars were being thoughtfully deployed; demonization of wealthier New Yorkers, who foot a vastly disproportionate share of the bill, has not helped either. But it is a fantasy — for reasons both operational and political — to believe that efficiencies alone can pay for the public services we need to make New York function properly, much less at a world-class level, and particularly if Trump starts slashing Federal aid.

The reality is that New York has long been a high-tax state and city, and well-off New Yorkers have historically been willing to pay for effectively delivered public services in a place like no other. Mike Bloomberg made this exact point in 2003 when he described New York as a “luxury product.” His words were either misunderstood or mischaracterized by progressive critics who said they showed his elitist stripes; in fact, he was making the case for higher taxes.

And both camps need to start caring in a way they never have before about responding to our housing shortage with affirmative policy changes that allow and spur new construction — not just the capital-A “affordable housing” that politicians love to talk about, but housing that will be affordable because we build a lot of it. In doing so we can relieve pressure on the entire housing market, return to an era of population growth rather than decline, and stop giving up ground to red states in the Electoral College.

* * * * *

For all the reasons Donald Trump may try to do us harm, the New York project is the most significant progressive project in America — even as it is also the birthplace of American capitalism and a testament to its power. These two pieces of our identity are far less in tension than they are mutually reinforcing.

My journey through politics and government has afforded me the unusual privilege of immersion in both leftist and centrist ways of thinking about public policy in New York. I have long been struck by how important it is to New York progressives and moderates, respectively, to distinguish their positioning from one other. In a place where Republicans have functionally little power, debates between these camps tend to be about how best to shepherd the New York project forward, with gaps of priority, approach, and rhetoric more than ideology. 

This divide has long been a case study in the narcissism of small differences, and we can no longer afford it. The return of Donald Trump puts the New York project at risk, and an unprecedented unity of purpose will be required to save it.

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A politician stands before a group of voters. 

The crowd has an instinct about something, a view that isn’t fully grounded in realities on the ground or the complexity of an issue. Their half-formed position might involve an excess of cynicism, or an imagined bogeyman, or an obvious solution that is inexplicably being ignored, or all three. The politician may not be terribly well-informed either, or he or she makes a judgment that preaching to the choir is easier than getting into the weeds and trying to change assumptions. The voters walk away emboldened, angry at everyone but the politician. The politician walks away with votes and a mandate to fight. The next time they meet, the alignment and the certitude in the room will be even stronger — and wronger. 

This feedback loop of reductionism might be the thing I hate most about New York politics, and it’s why I’ve started this Substack — to stand before the group and say, from time to time: “What I’m about to tell you is not what you want to hear, but give me a minute.”

I tried to do this as a candidate in the Democratic Primary, last spring, for the State Assembly in New York’s 69th District. In community centers and living rooms, I would find myself walking through why an unpopular program had some merit, or why we shouldn’t do something that seemed like a no-brainer. I did this not to be contrarian (although I’m sure that’s how it came across sometimes), but because it felt better to me than saying the easy thing and, more significantly, because I didn’t want to be stuck with positions I couldn’t earnestly defend in the event I ended up in office. 

Sometimes these expressions of candor fell flat, but more often than not, even if I didn’t convert the room, it felt as though I succeeded in raising healthy questions in the minds of the people with whom I was speaking. And, because disagreement is the New York state religion, I think I won more votes than I lost in these exchanges.

* * * * *

Earlier in my career, I had the privilege to work for the City of New York as Director of the Office of State Legislative Affairs, representing city agencies and the mayor (at the time, Mike Bloomberg) before New York State government. Commonly referred to as “the City’s lobbyist,” the job was one part lobbying, one part policy-making, one part negotiating, all done together with a fantastic team of public servants. It was a formative experience and, I hope, at least somewhat helpful training for the job I’ll soon start as a State Assemblymember. 

My best days on that job were when I truly, deeply understood both the position of the agency I was representing and also the opposing view held by a legislator or State official — understood each so well that I could make a persuasive case to the other and, more important, see the merit on both sides, which there generally was. 

This kind of intellectual empathy would arise only after real engagement with someone’s perspective, as well as the experiences undergirding it — from hearing an argument on one side, ascribing full credit to it, and asking for the other side’s response, and going back and forth like this until a shared understanding, if not agreement, was reached. 

Before one of our two national political parties completely lost its mind, it was a truism to say there should be more reaching across the aisle in Washington. In New York, there is no partisan aisle to reach across, and our differences as Democrats are often, in the grand scheme of things, fairly modest. But we too often still fail to see, or even acknowledge, the merit on the other side of an argument. Policy outcomes are worse as a result — people stay in their corners, holding out until either one side wins in a shut-out or there is a hasty and forced compromise, with bits from column A and bits from column B that don't really add up to something coherent or workable.

* * * * *

I have been chipping away, since shortly after Election Day, at a piece on how to think about “Trump-proofing” New York (an effort that will, I am afraid to say, at best be a partial success). It’s close to completion, which is what has spurred me to finally get this Substack up and running. I was going to call the whole thing, “Two things can be true at the same time,” which is the sentence I find myself repeating most often when discussing policy, along with its close cousin, the construct “not just / but also.” 

As in: “Yes, this policy has had its desired effect. And it has also had a negative consequence. These two things can be true at the same time.” 

Or: It is the job of politicians not just to represent the views of their constituents, but also to help inform those views.

But looking at it in pixels, I realized that “Two things can be true at the same time” is a long and lousy title, so it has been relegated to this first post. “Into the Weeds” is a nod to two of my favorite pastimes — getting lost in details, and theater, which may also be an occasional topic here.

More to come.