WASHINGTON — In the giddy days since midterm voters swept them into power, congressional Democrats have vowed to address not only the high cost of living that fueled their victories but the corruption they say is rampant in the Trump administration.
“Walk and chew gum at the same time” — that’s the mantra from lawmakers who assert they can both legislate and investigate effectively.
But they also are trying to link accountability and affordability, arguing that oversight of the executive branch will help reverse the price increases on gas, groceries, and other essentials that angered so many voters.
“We didn’t treat corruption as some abstract complaint about ethics in Washington,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat in line to lead the new majority next year. “We told people the plain truth: that your costs are high in no small part because the powerful in this town are too busy helping themselves at your expense.”
The House and Senate are empowered to make laws and serve as a check on the executive branch. Still, Democrats realize they have to deliver on their promise to ease prices or risk the same backlash that led to the historic midterm wipeout of President Trump and Republicans.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to lower costs on “day one,” but his policies — including high tariffs and a war with Iran — pushed costs up.
He turned his focus away from lowering the elevated inflation that he successfully blamed on Democrats, helping him win in 2024, even arguing that immigration was a bigger driver of his victory than the economy despite exit polls showing that wasn’t the case.
“Donald Trump’s biggest weakness in this election was that he was elected to lower costs, and he was focused on things that were not lowering costs. And more importantly, voters saw him as someone who was not focused on lowering costs,” Democratic pollster David Shor said at a postelection event held by the progressive Center for American Progress Action Fund. “We just did the same thing, so hopefully we don’t make the same mistake.”
Democrats know they need to keep their focus on reducing costs despite a groundswell from the party’s base to launch a slew of investigations and possibly try to impeach Trump again.
“Clearly the bigger priority for me and I think for most people in America, especially people living paycheck-to-paycheck, is ‘please help us with the cost of living,’” newly elected Democratic Senator Adam Hamilton from deep-red Kansas, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “If I spent the next two years — my first two years in the Senate — in investigations, I’d be deeply disappointed.”
But many congressional Democrats said conducting oversight of the Trump administration and working to reduce the cost of living are inherently linked. They point to the Iran war as a prime example.
“We have a president who has not been held accountable by this Congress,” said incoming Massachusetts Representative Dan Koh, a Democrat who won the race to replace Seth Moulton in the district that covers the North Shore and parts of the Merrimack Valley. “The co-equal branch of government is not doing its job. So we exercise that co-equal right, end the war in Iran, [and] that’s going to lower prices for people.”
Democrats said ending the war will immediately lower gas prices that shot up because oil from the Middle East was choked off by Iran’s attacks on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. But Democrats also need to investigate the reasons that Trump launched the war in the first place, said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat set to chair the House Judiciary Committee next year.
“The first meaningless false dichotomy comes from the media, which is: Are you going to do accountability, or are you going to do affordability? As if they were in any way different from each other, he said at the postelection event. ”What’s the main dramatic price increase people have been complaining about? Well, it’s gasoline, which is up a buck fifty a gallon since before the Iran War started.“
Raskin said there are questions about conflicts of interest involving the Middle East negotiations by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. As the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Raskin began an investigation last April into Kushner’s “financial conflicts of interest.” As chair of the panel, Raskin and the Democrats will now have subpoena power.
Corruption was a major issue in the campaign. While affordability topped the concerns of midterm voters, with 39 percent calling it the most important issue facing the country, the “state of democracy” came in second at 33 percent, according to the Associated Press Voter Poll.
Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, who was reelected last week, said the best response he received at his campaign events came from a line about Trump serving up “an all-you-can-eat buffet of corruption for himself, his children, his cronies, and his corporations.”
“That’s what got the loudest applause, and that we have to root it out of the American political system and make him accountable for that corruption because it affects your lives,” Markey said. He noted the large contributions flowed into Trump’s campaign from the oil and natural gas industries and then his administration enacted policies that harmed wind and other alternative energy projects.
“The dramatic rise in the cost of living, the rate of inflation, has come from energy prices, and energy prices are are directly tied to Trump policies,” Markey said.
Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat who won New Hampshire’s open Senate seat last week, said he also heard a lot about corruption on the campaign trail and believes voters made the connection to their own struggles.
“Everyone knows this president’s $2 billion richer than when he came into office, that he was focused on building monuments to himself instead of tending to the needs of the country,” Pappas said. “I think people have the sense that there’s a set of folks for whom things are working really well right now, while they’re getting screwed.”
Since the election, congressional Democratic leaders have been consistent about linking costs and corruption.
“We ran as affordability Democrats and every single campaign had that at its center: lower costs, make sure every American has health care when and where they need it that they can afford, and hold those who are enriching themselves through corruption at taxpayers’ expense accountable,” said Revere Representative Katherine Clark, the second-ranking House Democrat. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.