Voters changed Congress. The next majority will decide whether a family seeking food assistance, a person facing deportation or a civilian under American bombs experiences any change at all.
On November 2, a day before Americans voted to take Congress away from Donald Trump, US forces struck Qeshm Island at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Officials described the operation as defensive. Trump had said the United States would not attack Iran before the midterms, and yet American forces struck Iranian territory while voters were preparing to decide whether his party should retain control of both chambers. The Washington Post reported the Qeshm strike and Trump’s earlier statement.
Democrats won the House and Senate, but the new Congress will not take office until January. A person waiting for a visa decision, a family applying for food assistance and a merchant sailor crossing Hormuz will meet the same federal systems this morning that they met on election day. Trump still commands forces already deployed, agencies still spend money already appropriated and surveillance continues under existing authority. Voters changed the balance of power in Washington, and yet the machinery that acts on people has not changed with it.
Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner had already discussed the possibility of cooperation before the election. The meeting raises a question for Democratic voters who expect the next House to investigate Trump’s administration and his family: how much of that investigation will survive the search for common ground? It also raises a question for MAGA voters who expect a fight to the finish with the opposition. Jeffries and Kushner had a private channel while the parties were conducting a public campaign against one another, and neither side’s voters were in the room.
The New York Times described a discussion of possible areas of agreement, and CBS News independently confirmed the encounter. Jeffries later said Kushner had asked to discuss affordability. The private conversation deserves scrutiny because Kushner is the president’s son-in-law and an adviser with commercial interests, while Jeffries is positioned to lead the House that can investigate those interests. No account of the conversation has established what either man promised.
Democrats can call Trump officials to a televised hearing and still vote for the contracts and weapons those officials use. A constituent may see the hearing on a phone while waiting for a benefit, an immigration appointment or news from relatives in Iran. What Congress does after the cameras leave will reach that person’s life more directly than the confrontation on screen.
Five people with knowledge of the August meeting told the original reporters that housing, immigration and the cost of living were possible areas of cooperation. Kushner suggested that Jeffries might subsequently meet White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. The chain of access is unusually clear: a meeting in a New York room provided by a mutual friend, an informal presidential adviser at the table and a proposed route to the official who manages the White House. It warrants an account from Jeffries of what was discussed, what follow-up occurred and whether his caucus was informed. It does not establish that the men agreed to protect Trump or predetermine the November vote.
Jeffries confirmed that the conversation took place and said Kushner had requested it to discuss affordability. A renter facing another increase would welcome a bill that lowered the monthly payment. That bill would have to be judged by what it actually changed, and so would any bargain around it. A cheaper apartment would not make a wider government search of the renter’s records harmless or justify another appropriation for the Iran war. The question is whether leaders will offer a household gain as the reason to stop asking about the powers they leave intact.
Jeffries and Kushner had worked together during the first Trump administration on criminal justice legislation. An existing relationship explains how two political adversaries could arrange a meeting without an elaborate intermediary. Their familiarity also makes the public accounting more necessary. Kushner’s access to Trump is familial, political and commercial at once, and Jeffries is approaching a speakership with investigative powers.
Voters do not need a theory of secret election management to ask whether a member of the president’s family received assurances about the limits of future inquiries. The answer requires a record of communication, testimony or conduct after January; the room by itself supplies none.
Trump spent the campaign making politically destructive claims and conducting a war that contributed to voter anger. Those decisions can be described without treating each blunder as a staged maneuver. The suggestion that he arranged the loss of both chambers converts a defeat into evidence of his mastery, and it asks the reader to disregard the voters who opposed him. A president may try to bargain after losing Congress. That prospect is serious enough without granting him authorship of the election that weakened him.
A majority that can investigate
Jeffries’s November 4 letter seeking the speakership promises to hold Trump accountable, improve affordability and confront the Iran war. It also leaves room for bipartisan agreement on matters that affect household budgets. The combination is public. Voters can read it now and compare it with the votes that follow. A private agreement is unnecessary to explain why a party leader might pursue a housing bill while preparing an investigation; the constitutional system permits both at once.
Democrats will have committee chairs, subpoena power, control over the House floor and a Senate majority. They can compel officials to appear, seek documents, write conditions into appropriations and decline to provide fresh money for named programs. Their control has limits. Trump can veto legislation, and the Senate cannot convict him after impeachment without two-thirds of members present. A 54-seat majority can expose wrongdoing but cannot remove a president by itself. The arithmetic is a restraint on what Democrats can accomplish; it is also a convenient shelter for leaders who prefer the appearance of confrontation to the cost of using the powers they do possess.
An angry hearing is easy to recognize; the decision that follows it often sits deep in a spending bill. A committee might summon an official while leaving the contractor with the most useful records untouched. A member might denounce a data system on television and then vote to maintain it. A senator might oppose the Iran war on Monday and fund its ships on Friday. The person facing an enforcement decision or paying more for fuel will live with the Friday vote.
The 2007 Iraq precedent sits close at hand. After voters gave Democrats Congress in the 2006 midterms, their majority sent George W. Bush a war funding bill with withdrawal dates. Bush vetoed it on May 1, 2007. Congress then passed a replacement without the dates, and he signed it on May 25. The Congressional Record sets out the sequence. The party had confronted the president in public, and yet its final appropriations decision kept the war financed. That history cannot predict every vote in 2027. It tells us which vote matters after the public confrontation fails.
The immigration system already has a contractor
In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its work with Palantir by about $30 million to develop ImmigrationOS, a system described in contract material as a tool for selecting enforcement targets, tracking departures and organizing removal work. WIRED’s examination of the award described a contract expected to run at least through September 2027. That date passes through the election, the seating of the next Congress and much of its first year. Immigration officers do not need to wait for Jeffries and Kushner to agree on anything before they can use systems purchased under an existing agency relationship.
That relationship began before Trump returned. The 2025 award added to a Palantir contract signed in 2022, under Joe Biden, for ICE’s case management system. The fact does not make Biden and Trump interchangeable on immigration. It identifies a supplier and an agency workflow that crossed the change of administration, then acquired a larger role under the next one. A contractor can preserve technical continuity while elected leaders argue fiercely about the policy it helps enforce. The mechanism is mundane: a base contract, additional work and an operational need defined by the agency buying the service.
The new House can request the contract, amendments, technical requirements, usage reports and records of errors. It can ask who sets the criteria used to prioritize a person for enforcement, what information comes from other agencies, how officers review a suggested target and how a person can challenge a mistake. Congress can condition future appropriations on those answers. None of those steps requires lawmakers to prove that a secret world government built the software. They require a committee willing to treat procurement as a question of public power.
The contractor’s vocabulary is practical: officers can find people faster and organize cases in one place. The person named in a case may have supplied an address to receive a service, earned wages recorded by an employer or appeared in a location history gathered for another purpose.
If any of those records contributes to a mistaken identification, that person needs to know which fact was wrong and how to correct it before an officer arrives. The contract promises speed, and yet speed gives an error less time to be caught. A Democratic majority that opposes mass deportation must find out how a person moves from a database entry to an enforcement target, including which parts of the system earlier administrations purchased.
Trump’s Executive Order 14243, signed March 20, 2025, directs agencies to remove barriers to access to unclassified government records and to promote sharing across departments. Its stated purpose is to identify waste and fraud. It also directs officials, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to secure federal access to comprehensive data from state programs receiving federal money, including information held in third-party databases. The legal qualification matters: the order does not repeal privacy statutes by itself. The institutional direction matters just as much: it instructs officials to pursue wider access wherever current law permits it. The Agriculture Department’s subsequent data guidance carried that instruction into relationships with federally funded state programs. The argument for access was framed in ordinary administrative terms. Officials wanted records that could identify error and abuse. Their stated purpose does not settle whether information collected for nutrition assistance can safely move to another enforcement context, or who decides when a new purpose exceeds the one for which a family provided its details. Privacy often depends on boundaries between offices. Once those boundaries are loosened, the burden of finding an improper use falls on people least able to see the system.
The order gives officials routes to records held in different places. It does not document a single database containing every American’s records. A family can give information to a state office to obtain food assistance and later find that federal officials have access to the same information under a wider sharing arrangement. The questions are who asked for it, what purpose they gave and whether the family can discover and correct a mistake. Separate databases offer little comfort when the permissions connecting them keep expanding.
Democrats cannot claim that the appetite for commercially available information belongs solely to Trump. The Biden administration opposed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act in April 2024, arguing that limits on government purchases of certain personal data would damage intelligence and law enforcement work.
Supporters of the measure argued that agencies should not be able to buy from brokers information they would otherwise need legal process to obtain. The House debate preserved both positions. The House Judiciary Committee had approved the bill with broad bipartisan support, and yet the executive branch under a Democratic president defended a route to the data. The new majority inherits its own party’s part of that argument.
Those records support a harder conclusion than the claim that every politician is working from one script. There are legislators in both parties who seek limits, officials in both administrations who seek access and contractors whose business improves when the access grows. The alignment changes by issue and vote. The machine survives because its advocates are organized inside standing institutions, while the people whose data it collects encounter its decisions one case at a time.
A law expires; the surveillance continues
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act supplies an unusually exact example of institutional continuity. The statutory authority lapsed in June 2026 after a reauthorization effort failed. Existing certifications approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in March can nonetheless keep collection running until March 17, 2027. The Brennan Center explains the separate clocks. A deadline passed in Congress, and yet the system retained a legal route to continue operating for another nine months. The public could watch a legislative defeat and reasonably assume a program had stopped when it had not.
Democrats joined 19 Republicans to defeat the renewal. Those members took a position against extending the power, even as a previously granted court approval kept it alive. Their resistance deserves recognition. Its limit deserves the same attention. The statute’s expiration did not settle how long collection could continue, which searches involving Americans remain permitted or what a new bill might authorize after the existing certificates end.
Two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Adam Schiff, sought release of a surveillance court opinion they said described serious violations of Americans’ rights. Their account of the withheld material is an allegation about a document the public has not been allowed to inspect. A majority that claims to defend civil liberties can demand the opinion, explain the nature of any violations it confirms and attach enforceable conditions to any renewal. It can also allow the operational calendar to force another hurried vote under warnings that intelligence collection will fail at midnight. The March 2027 date makes that choice immediate for the new Congress.
For someone whose messages are swept into a foreign intelligence collection, the practical issue is whether an agency can search those messages without first getting a warrant. For someone whose phone records a location, it is whether the government can buy that location from a broker. For someone matched to the wrong person in a government database, it is whether anyone will show them the error in time to correct it. Congress can set those limits in law and require officials to keep records of their searches, and yet its members will see classified accounts of the program that the people subject to it cannot inspect.
Classification makes the politics asymmetrical. Officials can describe threats in private, warn that limits will cost lives and refuse to publish the record of misuse on which legislators base their concerns. The public is asked to weigh a concrete fear against an injury it cannot inspect. If Jeffries uses the speakership to obtain the court opinion and force a vote on clear restrictions, he will have done more than perform opposition. If the opinion remains sealed while Congress renews the authority, the vote will tell us what his promises meant.
The Iran war is not waiting for January
The US and Israel began the major campaign against Iran on February 28. By November the conflict had already changed energy markets, shipping routes and the lives of civilians across the region. A strike on Qeshm Island the night before the election was an operation inside that war, whatever language officials used to describe its immediate purpose. The timing matters because American voters were deciding whether to punish the party that led them into the conflict, and yet the military chain of command remained wholly in the president’s hands until their representatives could take office two months later. The administration’s public account of why it entered the war has shifted. Reuters reported in March that Secretary of State Marco Rubio connected US action to the expected consequences of an Israeli attack, while Trump said Iran had been preparing to strike first. In that account Trump did not provide evidence of the claimed imminent Iranian attack. Congress should demand the intelligence, the legal analysis and the communications with Israel that preceded the opening strikes. A briefing that tells members how the operation is progressing cannot substitute for an explanation of why the United States began it.
On March 4, a war powers measure seeking to halt unauthorized hostilities failed in the Senate, 53 to 47; Reuters reported that all but one Democrat backed advancing it and all but one Republican opposed. That was a real division. It did not end the campaign.
A president can veto a binding measure passed later by a Democratic Congress, and the party’s newly won Senate majority falls well short of the votes needed to override him. The obstacle is constitutional and political. It does not excuse leaders from deciding whether to confront the financing of the war.
The first test will be a bill with an amount attached. The executive may request money for naval operations, replacement munitions, deployed personnel or expanded missile defense. The administration can place a war account alongside troop pay and maintenance for ships that perform other missions. At that point, legislators who oppose the blockade will be asked to vote for the package because refusing it could be portrayed as abandoning Americans already sent to sea. The same logic defeated the 2007 Iraq withdrawal timetable after Bush’s veto. The appropriations language, not the severity of a committee member’s questioning, will determine whether the operation gets another funded year.
Jeffries has named the war as a cause of rising costs in his appeal for the speakership. He can use that argument to insist on a timetable, a legal basis and an accounting of the people killed, including those beyond the US military. He can refuse new money for identified operations. He can demand that the White House explain the terms under which the blockade ends. These steps cannot guarantee immediate peace, and a veto could force a confrontation over a wider budget. They would establish whether the new majority regards its opposition as a principle worth defending when the president names the political cost.
The people exposed to that choice have no place in the American midterm result. An Iranian civilian needs the aircraft to stop coming. A sailor navigating Hormuz needs a passage that is safe to cross. A household in Karachi needs the cost of imported fuel to fall before the next bill arrives. A Washington agreement that quiets the argument while keeping the blockade in place delivers none of those things, and yet its authors may call it the end of a crisis because the television coverage has eased.
Kushner’s business and the public office around it
Kushner’s meeting with Jeffries cannot be separated from his place in the administration. He is a family member with access to the president, an informal adviser on foreign affairs and a private investor whose business has sought capital from Middle Eastern governments. In March, Representative Robert Garcia and Senator Wyden demanded information about his efforts to raise money while exercising influence over US policy. Reporting on their inquiries identifies a conflict question that existed before the August meeting. It does not prove that Jeffries promised to end the inquiry. The next Congress can ask for the dates of Kushner’s meetings, the investors his firm approached and the public decisions on which he advised. A family watching an investigation needs to know whether a foreign government could buy private access to a person shaping US policy. The documents could establish that an investment and an official decision were unrelated; they could also show a conflict that officials failed to manage. If the White House refuses a subpoena, the refusal can be put before the public. If the House never seeks the records, voters will know which question its leaders chose to leave unanswered.
Imagine a House that holds hearings about Trump’s rhetoric, stages confrontations with cabinet secretaries and leaves Kushner’s financial relationships outside its subpoenas while negotiating with him through a private channel. That sequence would support an argument about selective accountability. The meeting alone supports a question, not the answer. The distinction protects the investigation from becoming a machine for asserting what it has not established.
The same standard applies to Israeli influence. Reporting before the election described Netanyahu pressing for renewed attacks. Congress should seek the requests, the US responses, the military assessments and the legal advice attached to them. That inquiry would identify what Israel’s government asked Washington to do and what American officials chose. Compressing those actors into a single force called “Zionism” would make it harder to assign responsibility to the people who gave orders or approved them. American leaders have agency in this war. They must answer for its use.
The phrase “Agenda 2030” has become a container for fears about state data systems, private contractors and governments that speak in a language of modernization while extending control. Some of those fears have identifiable objects. ImmigrationOS has a named customer and a procurement history. Trump’s data-sharing order has a date, text and signature. Section 702 has a statutory deadline and court certifications. Each can be investigated, amended, limited or defunded. Their documentary trails matter more than a slogan broad enough to explain any outcome after it happens. The UN’s 2030 Agenda, adopted in 2015, sets 17 sustainable development goals. Its review process is described in its own text as voluntary and country-led, and it affirms states’ sovereignty over their resources and economic activity. The document does not authorize the suspension of the American Constitution or direct Jeffries and Kushner to govern together. A public official may invoke a development goal while pursuing an intrusive domestic policy, and that official should be challenged on the policy’s authority, funding and effects. The invocation is not evidence of a hidden command from the UN.
“Bolshevism” is an equally poor name for privately owned technology companies selling their products to a capitalist state. The business model belongs to procurement, investment returns and durable government customers. Naming that transaction plainly leaves the criticism sharper: taxpayers finance systems that can enlarge the state’s power over people while the firms supplying them acquire revenue, data access and influence over how agencies work. The mechanism can survive an election because contracts and agency habits are designed to do so. No imported label improves the description.
What a bargain would look like
MAGA voters may expect the Democratic Congress to spend two years hunting Trump and his family. Many Democratic voters expect precisely that investigation. They can both be disappointed without a secret unity cabinet ever forming. Jeffries might negotiate a housing package with the White House and issue subpoenas elsewhere. Trump might veto bills and accept selected spending deals. Those are familiar features of divided government. The authoritarian danger lies in a narrower possible accommodation: each side gets a public fight it can sell to supporters while both allow the coercive instruments to remain funded and legally available.
The terms of an accommodation can be read in public records. Congress can obtain the surveillance court opinion before renewing Section 702. It can require ICE to show how ImmigrationOS uses outside data and how a person can correct a mistaken match. Investigators can seek Kushner’s financial records and the communications surrounding the first attack on Iran. Every one of those decisions has a date, a document and a responsible official. The clearest record will be the vote on a bill that supplies fresh money to the war Democrats say they oppose.
A hearing can be necessary and still insufficient. It can give witnesses a chance to testify, put records in public and force the administration to explain conduct it would rather conceal. Those are worthwhile uses of Congress. The danger comes when legislators treat exposure as the completed task while the executive retains the authority that produced the abuse. If the majority calls a general to testify about Qeshm and then finances another year of strikes, the hearing has identified responsibility while the appropriation has assigned permission. Democrats resisted the Iran war powers defeat in March. Members from both parties have challenged warrantless access to Americans’ information. Those facts make an account of seamless bipartisan control untenable. They also make the final choices more important: resistance inside a chamber can fail because of a veto, because leaders refuse to schedule a vote or because lawmakers abandon a restriction when it is attached to a bill they want to pass. Each route has a different owner. A useful investigation names that owner instead of treating every failure as evidence of one invisible plan.
The election has given the opposition the ability to expose misconduct, condition new spending and sometimes deny it. Trump remains president, the ships remain at sea and the databases continue to accept new records. The country voted against an administration that expanded deportation tools and went to war, and yet a family asked to surrender more information, a person facing removal and a civilian under the flight path will have to wait for Congress to decide what that vote changes. The majority’s first appropriations bills will answer them.