In the midst of a wild election night on Nov. 3, Representative Robert Garcia, Democrat of California and the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, had a gleeful message for Trump officials: “Lawyer up.” When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress in January, they would investigate corporate corruption, “the Trump crime family” and more, Garcia vowed.
The Constitution tells us what that accountability could look like. The framers gave Congress the authority to exercise oversight, including by investigating government corruption or failure in the executive branch. When the members of the next House and Senate take their seats in January, President Trump will still have his veto pen, which limits the laws they can pass. By contrast, their power to scrutinize his administration’s actions will be broad and independent. Lawmakers can investigate any problems they think they could address through legislation. Their power of inquiry is an “essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function,” the Supreme Court said in 1927, a principle it has since consistently upheld.
As Garcia suggested, Trump’s brash approach to governing has provided many targets for Congress. Along with the stream of reports involving self-enrichment by Trump’s inner circle — including $500 million in agreed-upon payments from a firm linked to the government of the United Arab Emirates for a stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm — Democrats could look into the tactics of ICE, the defiance of court orders, the lethal boat strikes by the military against supposed drug traffickers in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, baseless prosecutions of the president’s perceived enemies and the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. without the approval of Congress.
But a question looms: How does the next Congress deploy its investigative powers wisely, to serve the national interest rather than the cause of partisan revenge? If investigations become lawmakers’ main business, voters could think their new representatives are looking backward to settle scores rather than forward to improve their lives. In other words, the whole thing could backfire.
There is more at stake than just the legacy of the Trump era (and that in itself is a lot). For decades now, Congress has been increasingly weak and distrusted by the public. It’s the branch that’s most prone to be fractured and feckless, the one with a collective action problem as hundreds of people vie to set the agenda. If the next House and Senate conduct investigations wisely and well over the next two years, they could go a long way toward restoring public trust in their institution and righting the system of checks and balances that has tilted too far toward the presidency.
But Congress could also fritter away a huge opportunity. History offers lessons in both directions.
Congressional investigations of the executive branch have often given presidents “real trouble,” the political scientist David Mayhew has written. The scholars Eric Schickler and Douglas L. Kriner found that 80 percent of 30 investigations from 1947 to 2002 that received major news coverage resulted in legislation or a concession from the administration like the resignation of a high-level official. Congressional investigations also tended to depress presidential approval ratings, reducing the political leverage of the White House and supplying Congress with “at least a partial counterweight to presidential power.”
Watergate remains the potent example of Congress’s building a case to take down a president. At first, most Republicans didn’t see the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters as a serious scandal. But as Congress held hearings and major media outlets covered the mounting disclosures, Republican senators became more critical of the Nixon administration. Bipartisan agreement grew across professional Washington, signaling to the public that investigating Nixon was not partisan warfare. “Nixon’s approval rating declined by the same rate among Republicans as Democrats,” Schickler says. “That was key to his collapse.”
Sometimes, the exposure of wrongdoing is an end in itself. Against Nixon, however, Congress also effectively wielded the threat of impeachment. He resigned after a trio of Republican leaders in the Senate told him that if he did not leave on his own, he would be impeached in the House and convicted by the Senate.
Congress investigated the administrations that followed. But party loyalty increasingly mattered to members of Congress more than promoting the independence of their branch. A Democratic senator, J. William Fulbright, led the major probe into the Vietnam War when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Republicans, by contrast, did little oversight of the Iraq war waged by George W. Bush when they controlled Congress. Serious bipartisan scrutiny of the president generally receded. Trump’s first term intensified this development. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said in 2019. When Democrats led the chamber, the administration withheld the president’s tax returns from one House committee and then refused to cooperate at all when the House investigated whether Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter.
On the Bidens and Ukraine, the House fought back by impeaching Trump for abusing his power and obstructing Congress. But the Senate acquitted him in February 2020 as the Republicans who controlled it rallied around their defiant leader. His poll numbers rose during impeachment. Congressional oversight could not transcend our era’s supercharged partisanship. “When one party rejects an investigation, the public doesn’t care about it as much,” Schickler says.
For many months after Trump returned to office in 2025, reports that he was abusing his power were frequent but glancing. His base excused him, and his approval ratings sagged but then slightly recovered. It seemed possible that Trump had rewritten the rules that applied to Nixon. His vice president said so directly. Speaking in June to an appreciative audience at the Richard M. Nixon Library, Vice President JD Vance said it was “crazy” that Watergate had taken down a presidency. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.”
In Vance’s telling, it wasn’t Nixon who abused his power, but Congress and the special prosecutor who investigated the president. He was the target of a witch hunt, just like another president who sees himself as a victim. Like Trump, Vance argued, Nixon was targeted not by a coequal branch of government but by a “deep state” that overstepped its bounds. The characterization delegitimized oversight entirely.
The rout Republicans experienced in the 2026 midterm elections suggests that Vance read the electorate wrong. Trump’s party had its worst showing since the elections in 1974 and 1976 that followed Nixon’s disgrace. And there was a connection between giving Trump a free pass and taking a huge hit. Late-breaking polls showed that corruption topped voters’ concerns as Democrats linked the rising cost of living to profiteering in Trump’s circle, from the crypto deals to pay-to-play pardons. Now the new Congress has a chance to prove that Trump has not succeeded in rewriting the rules of accountability.
Democratic leaders can follow a model that they themselves built. In the summer of 2021, months after the House impeached Trump for a second time for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol but the Senate declined to convict him, the House formed a committee to investigate him for overturning the 2020 election results. The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 worked with a television producer to present its case in hearings that were packaged as prime-time episodes, optimizing clips for social media and late-night audiences. Most Republicans attacked the hearings alongside Trump, but two of them in the House, Representative Lynn Cheney of Wyoming and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, played prominent roles. “The committee was really good at the plot twist and the surprise witness,” says Josh Chafetz, a law professor who writes about congressional power. “There’s good evidence that Democrats didn’t have as bad a midterm in 2022 as they might have because of the Jan. 6 hearings.”
Beyond polls and election outcomes, the larger principle is Congress’s retaining the capacity to constrain the president that the framers intended it to have. “The manner in which Congress exercises the investigative power,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1975, determines “whether the constitutional order will in the end oblige the American government to control itself.” Congressional investigations have not stopped power from tilting toward the presidency. They’re insufficient for that and sometimes off base. But they’re still necessary.
Now what? How do Democrats balance digging into the Trump administration with proving themselves to voters who care much more about the cost of living? Before the election, I called Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman who helped steer the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, to ask how he was thinking about investigations. “The ideal cases to begin with are ones in which there is a fundamental corruption of government taking place, with officials in the Trump regime ripping off the taxpayers and preventing the nation from making real progress,” Raskin said.
Corruption is a theme, not a story line the way Jan. 6 was. To hold people’s attention, Democrats will have to avoid being scattershot as they choose targets. Private citizens can’t resist subpoenas the way government officials can. Calling corporate executives as witnesses could unearth details about the deals that have enriched Trump’s family and inner circle and deter companies from continuing to do this.
There will be pressure from parts of the Democratic base to punish the president rather than stop at exposing his wrongdoing. But impeaching Trump for a third time would return him to a role he savors — the aggrieved main character — and suck attention away from anything else Congress does. Raskin said that impeachment was neither a taboo nor a panacea. He also said that for the new Congress, restoring Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies would take immediate precedence over everything else.
When the election was over, Democratic leaders started signaling that their caucus is committed to investigating Trump but not turning him into a martyr. Going after a proxy figure, though, could flex their new muscle. At a post-election news conference, the incoming speaker of the House, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, said that no one in the Democratic caucus was talking to him about impeaching Trump; a few days later, he said yes to a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “The days of the House of Representatives functioning like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump administration are over,” he said. Congress holds the president accountable. And it gets to decide how to do so.
Source images for illustration above: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Getty Images.
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