Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is calling for Democrats to be more aggressive and put the GOP on defense after her party retook the Senate following the 2022 midterms.
“Where we can pursue legislative action, we should fight aggressively. When Republicans try to obstruct such action and the president can act by executive authority, he must,” the leftist senator wrote for The New York Times.
Over the weekend, the Nevada Senate race was called in favor of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) against GOP challenger Adam Laxalt, giving Democrats the majority in the upper chamber. It’s still unclear what party will control the House of Representatives.
“The Democrats should be aggressive in putting Republicans on the defensive, pressing hard on why they are blocking much-needed initiatives to help Americans,” Warren wrote. “Continuing to reduce inflation and putting money in people’s pockets, expanding the work force through affordable child care, lowering housing costs by increasing supply, raising taxes on the superwealthy, tackling corporate price gouging ... this is not a progressive wish list.”
Continued control of the Senate means Democrats will still be able to approve Biden’s nominees such as federal judges. That would include appointees to the Supreme Court should any vacancies open in the next two years on the bench with a 6–3 conservative majority.
House Republicans, should they prevail, have pledged to try to roll back Biden’s climate policies and want to make permanent a series of 2017 tax cuts set to expire. They also have vowed investigations into Biden administration activities and probes of the president’s son, who has had business dealings with Ukraine and China.
Some Republican senators, meanwhile, have called for a shift in the GOP’s agenda after the party failed to take the majority. They said that GOP lawmakers made errors when they capitulated to Democrats on gun-control, infrastructure bills, and other measures.
“The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on Twitter this weekend following Masto’s victory. “Washington Republicanism lost big Tuesday night. When your ‘agenda’ is cave to Big Pharma on insulin, cave to [Sen. Chuck] Schumer on gun control & Green New Deal (‘infrastructure’), and tease changes to Social Security and Medicare, you lose.”
