Van Hollen is Officially Running
After several days of saying he was considering it, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, officially announced last night that he would challenge Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for majority leader.
The activist wing of the Democratic base has been calling for Democrats to replace Schumer since before the election. “Yesterday, voters made it very clear that they want a new generation of Democratic fighters,” Indivisible, one of the key groups behind the extremely successful No Kings protests, wrote on social media. “We need a leader in the Senate who is capable of leading that fight.”
Upwards of a dozen senators have either said they would not vote for Schumer, or that they were open to another candidate; the opposition runs the gamut from left-wing to centrist, and includes many of the senators who were just elected to the chamber this month.
Schumer has maintained that he has the votes to win reelection, a plausible assertion. Democrats will have at least 55 senators, and the number publicly breaking with Schumer remains less than half that amount. Majority leader elections are not public.
Still, the challenge from Van Hollen is likely to be the most serious Schumer has faced since he became Democratic leader in 2017.
Van Hollen, who is on the more progressive side of the Democratic spectrum, attracted attention early in the Trump administration for traveling to El Salvador to meet with his constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been rendered to dictator Nayib Bukele’s notorious prison CECOT by the Trump administration in violation of a court order. When Democrats were still casting about for a voice post-2024 defeat, it was an early example of how to “fight,” even in an environment in which the party didn’t have legislative power.
Republicans Spring Into Action to Take Over a Legislative Watchdog Agency
- Repeatedly over the last two years, a legislative watchdog agency called the Government Accountability Office has been a lone voice declaring the actions of Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought to be illegal.
- Vought, who has a very … unique view of the Impoundment Control Act and has been a champion of DOGE-like efforts to dismantle the federal government, has consistently found ways not to spend funds that Congress ordered the executive branch to disburse. Consistently, the GAO has drawn attention to these violations.
- The agency has been without a permanent leader for the better part of a year. Now, Democrats warn, Republicans in the lame-duck Congress have belatedly woken up to that fact and are moving full-speed-ahead to get a Trump-friendly director atop the agency before they lose control of the legislature in a month and a half.
- One possible candidate, according to the Washington Sun: OMB Deputy Director Eric Ueland, who worked directly under Vought.
Tabs
- Don’t miss this wild piece in the Washington Sun featuring (pre-death) interviews with the Washington, D.C., emergency room doctor who yesterday decided to open fire on his neighbors and ultimately kill himself to draw attention to a dispute he was engaged in with his landlord.
- “President Trump called Jensen Huang on Tuesday, before the Nvidia chief stepped down amid a rapidly unfolding spy scandal, and urged him to keep fighting for his job,” the New York Times reports, citing two people briefed on the conversation.
Man of the Hour
I’m a bit late to this, but we couldn’t end the week without taking note of Palantir executive Alex Karp’s hilarious post-midterms reawokening. Karp’s politics have swung wildly over the years, though his recent transformations — including joining Silicon Valley in its bear-hugging of Trump — have lined up neatly with what’s good for business.
Immediately after the election and staring down the barrel of congressional oversight, he sat down with Politico’s Playbook — joined by the Democrat he had hired to advise him on congressional investigations, former Montana senator Jon Tester — to talk about his passion for “economic justice” and to insist he knew how to be on the left better than those on the left.
“I grew up in a far left environment. I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet, and I absolutely believe Palantir — all of our products are essentially progressive,” Karp asserted.
Are We at War?
Trump would like to “get Cuba done” before the end of his term, he told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“I’d love to be able to do it for the people, for the Cubans that came and were treated really badly, and they came to America,” he said.
