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There’s something gravely disturbing about Democratic Party leadership promises of accountability if the party regains control of the House of Representatives.
I’m not talking about Republican Democrats like Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) pushing back against accountability generally. I’m talking about the kind of accountability Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and other top House Dems are talking about.
Reportedly, House Democrats have a first-100-days agenda for when they take control. It includes accountability.
Politico just reported Tuesday that Democrats are planning to use three powerful committees to investigate Pres. Donald Trump’s trade deals and tariffs, “especially suspected quid pro quos that may have benefited wealthy interests and foreign governments.”
That possibility, the suspicion that Trump and his ilk profited from government policy, is the animating fuel of Democratic accountability measures.
Here’s Jeffries in August: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable.”
Here’s the New York Times on Tuesday: “Democrats who have spent months emphasizing the high cost of living in their fight to win control of Congress are increasingly invoking corruption in Washington to sharpen that message … blaming self-dealing by politicians for driving up prices.”
The problem with this is that it’s a lie.
The crooks aren’t the problem. The ideologies and ids are.
What drove up prices were tariffs and the Iran War. Correction: Illegal tariffs and the illegal Iran War.
Whatever profit Trump & Co. skimmed along the way isn’t an overpriced drop of oil in the bucket.
The economy isn’t fucked because of lawbreakers, it’s fucked because of the law.
The Democratic strategy implies that the government was working properly, which means it was government’s fault, which not only perpetuates anti-government narratives, it devalues the democratic engine we inherited.
Worst of all, the Democratic approach is to ignore the fact that the acts themselves were illegal. Illegal tariffs. Illegal war.
There is no talk of accountability for the fundamental, historic level of quotidian unconstitutional conduct by Trump and Friends. And yet, months ago, The New Republic’s Aaron Regunberg issued an urgent call, and rationales, for real accountability.
The most valuable thing Trump et al. stole was the machinery of American democracy and governance. They stole millions of times more money from us that didn’t go into their pockets.
Remember the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Where’s the accountability for that? Illegally taking over government agencies and violating federal privacy laws to Hoover up data on everyone they were dooming to live in Hoovervilles. Gutting foreign aid, unleashing strife and disease and killing hundreds of thousands of people in our name.
Illegal stealing of Venezuela’s illegal president.
Illegal stealing of Venezuela’s government.
Illegal stealing of Venezuela’s people’s oil.
Illegal use of illegal profits from Venezuela’s people’s oil to create an illegal Pentagon slush fund.
Illegal shadow diplomacy by shadowy figure Jared Kushner.
Illegal coup of our public-health and vaccination systems.
Illegal theft of lawfully allocated money for unlawful purposes.
Illegal commandeering of grant allocations.
Illegal military occupations in American cities.
Illegal threats of illegal military occupations in American cities.
Illegal military presence at ballot boxes.
Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com
Military patrolling the Columbia Heights ballot box at 6:44 pm "It's a public sidewalk" the lead soldier said when reminded of the law. Photo by selfWed, 14 Oct 2026 22:12:33 GMTView on BlueskyIllegal denial of lawful government benefits via illegal bullshit.
Illegal destruction of text messages and other government records.
Illegal DOJ lies in court.
Like malicious prosecution of an alleged reflecting-pool vandal.
Illegal and/or just stupid privatization of government functions.
Lying about immigrants, dead protesters, and civil servants.
Illegal kidnappings and renditions of immigrants and op-ed writers.
Illegal outsourcing of torture to El Salvador.
Antitrust cases dropped or not begun.
Indifference to white-collar crime generally.
Failure to enforce anti-corruption laws because Trump literally said don’t.
If I missed any examples, it’s not because I forgot — oh, wait, it is because I forgot, because that’s how many crimes there are.
And where’s the accountability for the accomplices? Where’s the accountability for all the just-obeying-orders order-obeyers who were just obeying orders? The ballot-box patrollers. The Boat-iac Killer drone button-pushers™?
Where’s the accountability for nations that enabled Trump’s illegal renditions by accepting Trump’s kidnap victims?
Not to pick on congressional candidate Shannon Taylor (D-VA), but the Times spotlights her own accountability agenda and it’s indicative of the problem. She writes “my first bill will mandate jail time of at least a year for any current or former member of Congress caught stealing $10,000 in taxpayer funds, including not paying their taxes.”
Okay. I guess.
I mean, there’s already laws against stealing. But what about members and anyone else who abets the theft of $100,000,000,000 in taxpayer funds?
All of this appears to be coming from standard political cowardice but also an inability to read polls. The New York Times reports that Democratic Party research showed that voters blame a “rigged system” for their economic woes.
To whatever extent they know it, what voters mean is not that individual thefts or bribes are raising the cost of fruit. It’s that the entire fucking thing has been retro-fitted since the New Deal to do the opposite of what the New Deal did and de-distribute the fruits of American labor to a tiny handful of assholes.
And when the Democratic accountability agenda inevitably fails to connect the dots between Donald Trump Jr. getting richer off crypto and families not being able to afford a car, what will people conclude then? That the system is rigged. And that Democrats are in on it. And in some cases they’ll be right.
During the administration of Pres. Joe Biden I spoke with a now-deceased former financial regulator who offered a theory in relation to one specific system-rigging that the Biden administration failed to unrig. Democrats, the former regulator said, didn’t even see the problem anymore.
Which suggests that even Democrats have internalized a half-century of economic frog-boiling and can no longer see how the system is rigged, so they focus on how individual bad actors abuse the (rigged) system.
We are, potentially, at risk of losing our institutional understanding of what works into the mists of memory.
Even if Democrats are just pretending to ignore the system’s problems or the big, systemic violence done to our system, Republicans already have a counterattack for the planned trade-and-tariffs focus. Politico reports that Republicans are going to frame it as an attack on workers — who generally favor tariffs even if it means short-term economic pain.
By making it all about Trump and associates, Democrats risk making it look personal and looking anti-worker going into 2028.
Heartbreakingly, they will also blow a chance to reclaim patriotism going into 2028 — to make accountability about love of country. Not nationalism, but love of the law. The systems. The bureaucracy. The bureaucrats. We used to have this and must again.
One thing that flummoxes Democrats today is that Trump+ have no shame. They brag about crimes instead of concealing them, which upends the normal process of investigating first.
Here’s an example, from Wednesday:
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Some Democrats argue that there’s too much to do, so they must focus on placating voters with measures to de-impoverish them but not too much. Not systemically.
This is the same mistake that caused our current impoverishment. After Pres. George W. Bush merely molested democracy, Pres. Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress had to put out the global economic wildfire Bush caused.
There was no accountability for the illegal wars, murder, torture, or more.
There was no accountability for the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection. The ones for whom no investigation was needed because they crimed on TV.
Congressional Democratic leadership didn’t even broach the fact that the 14th Amendment bars insurrectionists from holding office and the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that it was up to Congress to enforce it.
And here we are, with Trump emboldened.
Forsaking accountability creates unaffordability.
But maybe the worst thing about it is the patriotism opportunity cost. This is a teachable moment in which Democrats are teaching the wrong things and forgoing a chance to teach the country why our three branches are beautiful and checks and balances are ingenious.
If Democrats don’t act as though the assault on democracy that began Jan. 6, 2021, and resumed on Jan. 20, 2025, was an assault on democracy and mount a proportionate response — even though they’ve been given power primarily based on their promise to do so! — then Democrats will be responsible for a generation of Americans believing that the mechanics of our democracy — and democracy itself — do not matter.
No democracy can afford that.
SOME GOOD NEWS Trying to be fair about this, I kept an eye out for examples of real accountability.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, has already taken aim at Freedom 250, which Trump launched so that he, not the bipartisan America 250 organization, could control America’s 250th birthday, which Trump fucked up and turned into a joke through his usual method of touching it.
I asked Huffman whether he’s got anything in store accountability-wise that isn’t pegged to Trump’s self-enrichment. His response:
“Yes, quite a bit. The hijacking of America 250 is a pretty good example of lawlessness and corruption that was only tangentially related to self enrichment by Trump, although there was some of that too.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is working to build popular demand for Congress to investigate the Dept. of Homeland (sic) Security (DHS) for landing in the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) has already introduced a bill to abolish DHS and its evil brood — notably Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — while moving sane DHS components somewhere sane.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), ranking member of the Oversight Committee, just released a report on DOGE that’s too focused on the money and not enough on the criminal systemic assault, but, y’know, baby steps.
The point is, there are congressional Democrats who care and want to do something about unconstitutional violations of the Constitution. If the rest of us resist the distractions and noise and focus on amplifying real accountability, we’ll get it!
Release The IRS Files™!
The Trump administration is covering up tax data that could show just how effective the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBuBBA) was at stealing our money.
Politico reports that the IRS has delayed release of data due in July — and then in a September batch — that will reveal whether and how badly Republican candidates are lying about OBuBBA.
Specifically, the data being covered up includes how much taxes people in top tax brackets paid, not individually, but as a collective criminal cohort. Which will reveal the truth about OBuBBA.
In other words, Release The IRS Files™ about rich people in The Epstein Files™!
Now, it’s possible that routine, Trump-level incompetence has caused the delay, especially as it involves last year’s new law and also math. But if incompetence were the issue, it would’ve been the IRS delaying the release.
Instead, the delay was ordered by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a lead lieperson for the Trumpconomy. So, expect the damning data some time after Election Day. (Psst: This is also eligible for accountability.)
Crime Watch
POLITICAL PERSECUTION Here’s something that should be at the top of the Democratic accountability agenda, if not cloaking it like a full-body hijab.
The Wall Street Journal reports that what TFN irresponsibly speculated on Tuesday is, in fact, irresponsibly true: The investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is aimed at stripping her of her United States citizenship. And then removing her from the country.
Despite having sources familiar with the investigation, the closest the Journal comes to explaining why is this: “The president has long called for Omar’s deportation, using her as a rallying point for the GOP’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim wings.”
It’s fine for Congress to use hearings as fishing expeditions. Oversight includes kicking tires.
But law enforcement is decidedly not supposed to start with a desired presidential outcome and work backward from a backward president’s desires to reverse-engineer a case. And yet, here we are until we’re deported.
The Justice (sic) Department (DOJ) is looking for evidence that Omar or her father lied about her age so that she could become a citizen automatically, as his 17-year-old daughter, rather than have to apply separately as an adult. Thing is, you’re supposed to have evidence a crime happened before investigating people for crimes.
What’s that? There was evidence of a crime? Yep!
While Pres. Joe Biden was in office, the DOJ got a tip about Omar’s alleged immigration fraud. So, Homeland (sic) Security Investigations (HSI), the same Dept. of Homeland (sic) Security (DHS) agency that searched Omar’s home on Monday, looked into this alleged crime. Here’s the Journal: “[T]hey decided not to move forward because they lacked evidence of fraud.”
Which is evidence that this investigation is fraud.
CORRECTION Tuesday’s TFN irresponsibly speculated that Omar wasn’t home at the time. Reportedly, she and her husband were both home.
HSI took her phone, computer, notebooks, and her passport, all of which definitely contain evidence of fraud that she would have made sure to preserve after the first investigation missed it.
EXTRA CREDIT Obviously, Attorney General Todd Blanche is on record, at length, insisting that the DOJ must “never” take actions that could affect an election less than 60 days before said election. You can read his full filing here.
It’s obvious that the whole investigation will affect Omar’s election. Just not the way Trump wants.
Election Watch
TEXAS Never meet your heroes at a CNN town hall.
State Rep. James Talarico (D-TX) is preparing Democrats who love him for the disappointments to come.
At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, Talarico defended Big Oil. He told CNN he’ll stand up to Democrats “if they mess with our oil-and-gas industry” (which is killing us).
Team Talarico @teamtalaricohq.bsky.social
This was a flip-flop from past appearances when Talarico implied he was sane. He also disowned past sensible statements and assured voters he’s evolved to embrace bad and radical positions:
After calling capitalism an “oppressive system” and calling for “the process of dismantling it,” Talarico said Wednesday that he was just talking about “crony capitalism.”
Asked about saying we should “tear down the secret police force,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Talarico told CNN he opposes abolishing ICE and instead would reform our secret police.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thine younger, better self, my seminarian dude. Why not? Lemme put it this way: What shall it profiteth a man if he gain the world but lose his (metaphorical) soul?
Now, is it possible Talarico’s not just cynical enough to abandon his principles, but also cynical enough to pick them back up again if he wins? Let’s hope so!
One Quickie
It turns out that White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia — accused of lying about being a lawyer — actually did take the bar exam, the Wall Street Journal reports. Take that, haters! It also turns out that she failed said aforementioned bar exam. So she’s not a lawyer. Enjoy that, haters! And don’t forget it’s against the law to call yourself a lawyer when you’re not, so I assume the Dept. of Justice (sic) will be searching Zacharia’s house tomorrow for evidence of what she’s already said on TV.
Taking Action
You can find TFN Bonus Stories on close House races here and on close Senate races here.
No Kings is holding a virtual information session to explain your voting rights and how you can help safeguard your elections. It’ll be Oct. 29 and you can register here.
Saturday will be a nationwide day of action, No Kings: Vote Early. 50501 has more information here.
TCB
UPDATE Last week, I emailed Promise To America (PTA), the antisocialism campaign started by Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Adam Gray (D-CA), to ask what the fuck was going on and why we hadn’t heard from them. I didn’t hear from them.
So, on Saturday I posted a TFN Bonus Story detailing PTA’s failure to launch.
On Wednesday morning I got my first-ever PTA press release! And apparently PTA is growing! Not at a pace to meet their goals by Election Day, but still!
Anyway, I’ve updated the original story with details if you’re inclined to check it out.
AUTUMN FRIDAYS I’m gonna skip TFN on Friday, partly because I can (thank you!) and partly cuz I’m stressing over multiple stories I’m trying to finish before the elections.
You’ll still get the weekly digest, if you’re signed up for it, and you’ll still be in my heart and your regular TFN will soar to you with love again on Monday.
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