Veto, probes, impeachment: how far can Democrats go?

Democrats now control both chambers of Congress. They can investigate, block and even impeach, but ousting the president is a long shot .

On the night of November 3, the political map of Washington flipped. Democrats won both the House of Representatives and the Senate, ending two years in which Donald Trump governed with a Congress on his side. For the first time since 2019, the president faces an opposition with real power. The question now is not whether Democrats will challenge him, but how far they can go.

Their first weapon is money. In the United States, the government cannot spend a single dollar without Congress’s approval, and every budget bill starts in the House. Each funding deadline now becomes a bargaining table, and each threat of a shutdown a test of who blinks first. Their second weapon is questions.

Congressional committees can open investigations, demand documents and call officials to testify under oath. The choice of Jamie Raskin, who led Trump’s second impeachment, as the likely head of the House Judiciary Committee says a lot about the mood. The Senate adds a third weapon: it approves ministers, judges and ambassadors, so every name Trump puts forward will now face a closed door.

But a closed door is not a lock on the White House. Congress can slow the president down; it cannot govern in his place. Trump still holds the veto, which lets him block any law Congress passes, and only a two-thirds vote in both chambers can overcome it, a number Democrats are far from reaching. He had already promised to “veto everything” if they won. He can also act alone, through executive orders, emergency declarations, tariffs, foreign policy and pardons. What lies ahead, then, is not a government but a tug of war: Congress blocks, the president bypasses, and the courts are left to referee.

In this tug of war, one word keeps returning: impeachment. Trump has been through it twice already, and the Senate acquitted him both times. This time, Democrats are not short of material, from the use of a wartime law to deport migrants, to refusing to spend money Congress had approved, to military strikes on Iran launched without Congress’s consent. Even some voices on the right are uneasy: a Fox News legal analyst called Trump’s attacks on six Democratic lawmakers grounds for impeachment.

The real problem is not the evidence, but the numbers. The House can impeach with a simple majority, which Democrats now have. But conviction in the Senate requires 67 votes out of 100. With 54 seats, Democrats would need at least 13 Republicans to turn against their own president. In 2021, even after the attack on the Capitol, they fell ten votes short.

Democrats know this, which is why many of them hesitate. A Politico poll shows that 54 percent of Americans believe there are grounds for impeachment, yet party leaders fear a long trial would fire up Trump’s base and bury their own agenda. Trump himself saw it coming, warning in January that Democrats would “find a reason” to impeach him if Republicans lost.

So the real question is not whether impeachment can end Trump’s presidency. The question is what it would be for: a record of history, a message to voters, or a trap that turns the accused into a victim once again. The answer will shape not only the next two years, but the 2028 race.

And yet, politics rarely follows the script. If the unthinkable happened and Trump were convicted, the Constitution leaves no room for doubt: Vice President JD Vance would take the oath at once. Only if Vance could not serve would the presidency pass to the Speaker of the House, now a Democrat.

Which brings us to the question that will hang over Washington until 2028: if Trump fell, would Trumpism fall with him, or would it simply find a younger face?