No. of Recommendations: 9
What should the Democratic Party stand for in the midterm elections of 2026?
Where should it plant the flag?
Where should it make its stand?
The answer is simple: Article I of the Constitution of the United States.
The Democratic Party must stand for the restoration of the Congress of the United States. It must bring Congress back into the realm of the living from the land of the neutered and the dead.
Article I begins with words that have been rendered nearly meaningless by a Congress that has surrendered power, responsibility, dignity and purpose:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.
Congress.
Not the president. Not the White House chief of staff. Not presidential advisers. Not presidential relatives. Not billionaire courtiers wandering the earth conducting diplomacy without meaningful congressional accountability.
Congress. The first branch. The people’s branch. The branch empowered to write the laws, appropriate the money, regulate commerce, raise armies, maintain a navy, declare war, investigate the government and impeach presidents.
It has become a shell of what the Constitution intended.
The United States Congress has spent years surrendering its authority to the executive branch. Under Donald Trump, that surrender has accelerated into something more grotesque.
Congress has too often ceased behaving like a co-equal branch, and begun behaving like a politburo — ratifying the will of one man, surrendering its prerogatives, tolerating the humiliation of its members and abandoning the constitutional responsibilities that belong to them.
That must end.
This should be the promise of the Democratic Party in 2026: give us the House and we will restore Article I.
Everything else follows.
Everything else follows.
Stephen Schmidt
