Summary
Donald Trump signed an executive action revoking security clearances for attorneys at Covington & Burling LLP, the firm representing former special counsel Jack Smith.
The move escalates Trump’s targeting of those involved in past investigations against him. The administration is also reviewing Covington’s government contracts and considering similar actions against other firms.
Covington denies involvement in Smith’s investigations and is defending him in a personal capacity.
Smith previously led probes into Trump’s handling of classified materials and election interference, both dropped after Trump’s reelection.
What specifically do you want them to do?
They could sponsor a law, say, and then let it be shot down. That’s about as close as I could imagine to trying something and letting it fail.
They don’t have the power to initiate inquiries, not without a majority in at least one house.
I’m sure that there are members who have given speeches on C-SPAN, though I don’t watch that, or issued statements on their legislative websites. That doesn’t have an impact, though it’d let them put their position on record.
Their goal is going to just be doing whatever is most likely to politically benefit them in the midterms so that they can get majority control of at least one house in the legislature. At that point, they do have real power to affect things. My guess is that they probably have poll data on that, a lot of campaigners working on it, and a pretty good picture of what they believe is politically optimal to do there. If they thought doing symbolic political grandstanding of a particular form would help achieve that, I expect that they’d already know about it and be doing that. Like, this is their business. I’m probably not gonna be able to side-seat drive it better than they can.
At a minimum, act like there’s a group of angry citizens out there who did not vote for this, are ready to do something, and need to be organized.
The Tea Party figured this shit out. Republicans got shredded in late-2008, but you wouldn’t have known it by mid-2009. Democrats only narrowly lost, and all they can do is start committees and come up with nicknames like “Captain Chaos”.