The Street Moves First

When events outrun leadership

The House’s return this week is a toss into the pressure cooker of intraparty conflict. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries scuttled Speaker Johnson’s hopes to bypass the House Rules Committee and bring the minibus appropriations bill to the House floor on suspension. The measure would fund five appropriations bills through the end of the fiscal year and provide two weeks funding for a sixth, Homeland Security, while the parties negotiate over what to do with ICE.

This package is the deal that Sen. Schumer struck. In doing so, he weakened Democratic leverage to rein in ICE – the full weight of a government shut-down may have incentivized Republicans to provide more concessions. On the other hand, more than a few Democratic senators, including Sen. Schumer himself, likely were not all that interested in placing all that many more restrictions on ICE.

So the hot potato goes to the House. Rep. Jeffries, who apparently did not play a role in negotiating the package, decided to stake out a slightly more hardline position than Schumer. He has the same problem that Schumer had: Democrats who are not all that interested in putting significant restrictions on ICE. Jeffries had approved the previous deal – before the execution-style killing of a citizen by ICE agents – and like Schumer is now running to lead the movement that they hope will restore their party to political ascendancy in each chamber.

Jeffries, in declining to sign-off on moving the legislation on suspension, puts pressure on Speaker Johnson. The Speaker must somehow move the legislation through the Rules Committee that contains several hardline members and get it through the House when only a few Republican defections could sink the bill. Predictably, Republican hardliners are demanding concessions, whether on this package or as chits for later measures, and Johnson is caught in a box. The first rule of party leadership in the modern house is that you want to keep your team together and divide the other side. It’s worth trading a worse policy outcome for a better political outcome because the election is always just around the corner.

Approving the Senate deal is just the end of the beginning. For all the criticism Senate Democratic leadership took for staking out modest demands for ICE reform from those with legitimate fears about an armed, masked quasi-military agency that uses indiscriminate force under the direction of an authoritarian president, they have bought themselves time to start shifting demands, pull their members closer to a real hobbling of ICE’s tyrannical conduct, and let Republicans’ political scramble play in their favor. Unfortunately, the New Democratic faction in the House in support of modest legislation likely has an equivalent faction among Senate Democrats, undermining their ability to negotiate. Schumer was pushed by a movement to shut down the government once, but Senate Democrats are reluctant to use that power again to drive real reform.

Should MAGA hardliners in the House dig in, it’s possible that events on the ground will further erode the political position of the entire conference. Greg Bonivo may have left Minneapolis, but conduct on the street is little changed. ICE tear gassed a peaceful march in Portland, OR over the weekend. The Trump Administration is prepping an enforcement surge in Springfield, OH as Temporary Protected Status for Haitians expires, opening another “theater” of action. Frontline Republicans are in a vice as the next few weeks play out. They will find little sympathy from Democrats who wish to take their seats, and hardline Republicans who wish to extinguish them from the party.

We are still surprised, however, that Democrats had to come up with an ad-hoc plan. It took the massive amount of civil resistance and multiple murders in Minneapolis to instigate their action, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not the first people ICE has shot. Furthermore, ICE terrorized Chicago all summer, including a special forces-style raid on an apartment building in the middle of the night seemingly done to produce social media content. Federal agents have been saturating urban neighborhoods with toxins like tear gas and firing “non-lethal” munitions directly into the faces of protestors in places like Los Angeles.

What prompted Democratic leadership’s change of course was the actions of tens of thousands of regular Americans reacting to what they were seeing in their communities. They decided the fabric of those communities and the protection of each other were worth taking the physical risk of confronting an anonymous, unaccountable, and heavily armed security force. By doing so, they channeled one of the core principles of non-violent direct action that turning out to confront such an instrument of the state intentionally instigates it to act, likely in an uncontrolled manner.

The violence absorbed by the community demonstrates to the broader society the nature of the state power being confronted. It’s disappointing that Democratic leadership, some of whom have direct personal ties to the Civil Rights Movement, have held back until the public once again started putting its lives on the line for collective rights. It’s even more uncomfortable to acknowledge that it took the deaths of two white people in the primes of their lives to start congressional resistance from those who steer the party.

---

THE DEEPER POLICY DIVIDE

Democratic congressional leaders also are not confronting the policy purpose of an empowered ICE, which is the deportation of the undocumented population and terrorizing everyone else into submission. The administration actually is going beyond that by asking the Supreme Court to allow it to ignore the 14th Amendment and revoke the citizenship of the children of immigrants it finds, in the language of a century ago but in the same ideological frame, undesirable.

The administration has chosen to act where Congress has accepted stasis. The last time Congress took action was in 1986, in support of the Reagan Administration’s position of granting amnesty to three million people who had arrived after 1982, mostly to escape U.S.-involved conflicts in Central America. As the undocumented population rose starting in the early 1990s, Congress did nothing to address weaknesses of the 1965 Immigration Act nor the drivers of migration. Critics of Reagan’s amnesty program on the right like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh filled the void and focused on the racial components of the issue. When Congress finally attempted action on the issue in 2013, Tea Party members of the House who had emerged from Buchanan and Limbaugh’s influence shot it down.

As they largely were then, Democrats seem afraid to articulate the idea of America as a nation of immigrants, which is the core of this political controversy. The Administration’s overt opinion is that the racial diversity is corrosive to American society and American culture. Immigration is a wedge issue to make that argument. They have no trouble bringing in Afrikaners. But if you’re not Christian enough, or white enough, that’s where there’s a problem.

These views are indistinguishable from the white supremacy the Civil Rights Movement challenged and the older form of scientific racism that restricted immigration by “undesirable” people from the 1880s through the 1960s. These are rejections of the liberalism that supposedly has been the bedrock of the Democratic Party for several generations. It might behoove congressional Democrats to revisit the debate over terminating the national origins system of immigration control via the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, especially the connections members like Senator Hiram Fong made to ending restriction of Asian immigrants to the Civil Rights struggle.

ICE is stirring deeper historical echoes. Minnesotans’ actions resemble ordinary people’s responses to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s, as Jelani Cobb noted in the New Yorker this weekend. With its passage as part of the Compromise of 1850, federal commissioners hired bounty hunters and freelance agents to infiltrate Northern communities and abduct African Americans, whether they were escapees or not. Crowds repeatedly resisted and protested these efforts. Northern public opinion began to turn decisively against what became known as Slave Power in the South. It is not surprising to note that as the North came to resist the slaveocracy, political violence against politicians also increased.

Perhaps most significantly to our current political context, the fugitive slave hunts of the 1850s had a profound impact on the party system. Political elites revolted by the practice found little comfort in the inadequate responses of Whigs and Free Soil Democrats. In response, they organized the new Republican Party as an explicitly antislavery entity behind their moral outrage.

How mass protests shape the future political direction of their participants obviously is unknowable. Democratic leadership’s focus on the professional conduct of ICE, however, feels similarly out of touch with the level of moral outrage many of their urban constituents feel at this moment. In truth, they’re not articulating a counterargument that America is multiracial and multiethnic, or that people living here peaceably should not be removed, or even that the burden of maintaining a legal-based system should fall upon employers. The “abolish ICE” position gets at this policy debate more closely by removing the Administration’s main tool in pursuing its policy. It’s focused on an agency whose design and tools are antithetical to our national charter. It also represents a position that state power to reshape the demographic composition of the nation at the whim of the executive is untenable.

---

WORKING THROUGH CONTINGENCIES

How quickly the entire House can reassemble amid icy detritus and typical recess travel remains to be seen. This type of scenario where the chamber might have to wait additional days to resume urgent work is why we remain frustrated that Congress chose to make unavailable a remote work option. It is dangerous for the nation not to have a backup to ensure the continuity of government, especially for situations where the interruption might be caused by something more serious than snow. At a minimum, it should be permissible for members to gather on a secure remote meeting platform as was explored during the COVID-19 pandemic (not only in Congress in a remote hearing we helped organize but across democracies). Both chambers could create rules to authorize such a move under special circumstances and set limits to their duration. We went through this once already.

Daniel spent last week in Brasilia, which pioneered remote deliberations. There, lawmakers log into a secure voting platform via two biometrics. Once they have logged in, they can vote through their phones that day with an additional facial recognition verification. We are not recommending this system for daily use in the U.S. But in an emergency, members should be able to fully remotely deliberate on the floor and in committees. (This is not the proxy voting implemented by Speaker Pelosi, which had many failings.) For such a system to work, it requires the development of appropriate technology and practice by the members. Even Newt Gingrich agreed that such a technology would be viable in his testimony before the House. We should not wait for a natural or man-made disaster to once again occur.

---

DHS OVERSIGHT

The political fallout of events in Minneapolis has pushed up two oversight hearings involving DHS officials, including acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. The House Homeland Security Committee will hold its hearing on February 10 with Lyons, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow. The three will appear at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing two days later. Both Chairs Andrew Garbarino and Rand Paul thanked DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for making these witnesses available, which is not how this is supposed to work.

Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Joe Morelle and Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson issued a letter requesting a joint hearing on demands by Attorney General Pam Bondi for the Minnesota state government to turn over voter information in exchange for reduced immigration enforcement presence.

Senator Jon Ossoff’s office, meanwhile, reported that it had received more than a thousand credible reports of human rights abuses of people held in detention at DHS facilities, including family separation, poor holding cell conditions, and medical neglect. The office also interviewed dozens of detainees during inspections of several facilities in Texas. “Obstruction of Congressional oversight by the Department of Homeland Security, including temporarily

denying access to a facility based on arbitrary changes in notice requirements, has been an impediment to oversight,” its report notes.

---

SECURITY

The number on its face is gobsmacking: threat assessment cases logged by the U.S. Capitol Police rose to nearly 15,000 in 2025, an annual increase of 63%. These cases involve what the department describes as “concerning statements, behaviours, and communications” directed at members, their families and staff, and “the Capitol Complex” itself. These labels are extraordinarily broad, but as it does every year, UCSP only shares the top line of its data with the public. Without any granularity in the data to separate ugly social media posts from attempts at violence, they tell us little. This year’s findings, moreover, likely reflect the department’s use of tools to scan social media globally for concerning language. We don’t know how many of these hits came from people tweeting from foreign countries.

The top lines lack any data to provide context. They do not include the number of arrests, prosecutions, and convictions resulting from threat investigations, which are indicators of the seriousness of the threats. In past years, these numbers have been vanishingly small. In 2022, for example, 313 cases out of 7,500 threats were referred to the Department of Justice and only 22 people were prosecuted. USCP has hired its own attorneys to partner with DOJ as prosecutors, but consultation only occurred on 875 cases in 2025 – about 6% of recorded threats.

Our saying this is not intended to minimize the serious nature of the threats, but to underline that we don’t know how many threats are serious. How can Congress make decisions on appropriate funding levels for the Capitol Police, or where to focus protection, without any useful context?

The Trump Administration’s politicization of criminal justice creates fresh concerns about holding those threatening members accountable. The most obvious example is the mass pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists, but it is playing a role in the recent attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis in a troubling way. Although assaulting a member of Congress is a federal offense, the Hennepin County Attorney also charged the man who sprayed her with a syringe with assault and making terroristic threats. Political science professor Seth Masket concludes this is a sign the local prosecutor doesn’t expect the federal government to do anything in this case because of its disdain for Omar. A two-tiered system of criminal justice in which even members of Congress are diminished is not a functioning democracy.

Turning back to the USCP, we do not have an understanding from the information made available how much of the nearly $1 billion devoted to congressional-related security is being devoted to the most serious threats and how many resources are being sucked up monitoring threats that turn out to be hot air. USCP’s oversight board only has one staffer, and its IG does not have the authority to oversee the board.

The USCP press release noted that it has tripled the number of formal coordinative agreements it has struck with local law enforcement since last year, with more than 350 departments nationwide participating. For reference, there are more than 18,000 local law enforcement agencies in the country.

The most immediate solution for members right now is to take it upon themselves. A private security guard tackled Omar’s assailant, for which she pays tens of thousands of dollars quarterly out of campaign money as permitted by the Federal Election Commission. But anyone who’s heard the word “Altamont” knows the underlying risks of relying on private security lacking the same accountability systems as public officers of the peace. We are fearful that a wild west approach to hiring security will fail in all the ways one would expect.

Fellow elected officials, unfortunately, are part of the threat problem. Omar blamed President Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on both her and the Minneapolis Somali community for inspiring the man who assaulted her. She’s been a frequent target not only of Trump’s but her colleagues in Congress, particularly Rep. Randy Fine. Senator Tommy Tuberville said in the aftermath of the attack that she’d staged it and should accordingly go to jail. We’ve written previously about stochastic terrorism.

Although the House censured Rep. Paul Gosar in 2021 for posting an anime-style video in which he killed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the House’s dysfunctional ethics system lacks any real accountability mechanisms for members whose rhetoric dehumanizes colleagues and potentially incites threatening and violent behavior from others. (The Beyer-Bacon resolution to make it harder to hold members accountable for ethics violations on the House floor further weakens accountability.)

Members obviously have the constitutional authority to say anything they want, but conduct toward coworkers that would get anyone else fired from their job should have some institutional consequences. The entire congressional ethics system needs an overhaul to create actual accountability for members, but this is one area where self-correcting systems would have to be built from the ground-up.

On that topic, Rep. Shelia Cherfilus-McCormick is almost certain to remain in her seat even after the Ethics Committee found significant evidence that she laundered $5 million in federal government overpayments into her congressional campaign in 2022, as she is accused of by federal prosecutors. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has vowed to block her expulsion, which requires a ⅔ majority. A system in which members have to go to actual jail to lose their position is meaningless.

As for our friends in the Senate, their recently-released ethics report for 2025 showed once again that not a single matter resulted in a disciplinary sanction. I believe the technical term for this is the Lake Wobegone effect.

---

ODDS and ENDS

Retirements. Ways and Means Vice Chair Vern Buchanan is the latest senior member of the House to announce retirement. He was first elected in 2006.

After some awkwardness in which her campaign filed termination paperwork with no word from herself, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s office announced she will not seek re-election. She has served in the role since 1990, and her family wishes she had made the decision to leave sooner.

Fake publics’ threat. An international team of researchers considers how coordinated swarms of AI agents could ruin the public spheres of open democratic societies.

Institutional history. The National Capital Area Political Science Association – currently headed by J.D. Rackey at the Bipartisan Policy Center – will hold a roundtable on unique moments in the evolution of congressional procedure on March 16 at 2:30 PM. Register for the online event here.

Conflicts of interest. New to us: the Integrity Index, which collates members’ corporate donations, stock trading, and other financial information into a conflict of interest grade. 186 members have a grade of F.