"These Three Democrats Will Finally have the Power to Investigate the White House....

[mia]

How Far Will They Go?"

At noon on Jan. 3, the 435 members of the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress will convene for the first time in the Capitol. The chaplain will offer a prayer, the clerk will lead the chamber in the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll-call vote will be held to elect Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House. Then the new speaker will grasp the gavel and swear in the representatives-elect — their right hands raised, some of them clutching Bibles or Torahs or Qurans in their left. There will be speeches and family photos and, among the Democrats, who will now be in the majority, much celebration. But before any of that happens, Representative Elijah Cummings will have sent out letters.

One letter will have been jointly addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, demanding the age, gender, country of origin and current location of every child who was separated from his or her parents under the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Another will have gone to Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asking for the identities of any senior White House officials who have used — as Hillary Clinton once did — nongovernment email accounts to conduct official business.

The White House chief of staff will have received a letter, also addressed to the heads of multiple federal agencies, requesting information and documents about the use of government-owned aircraft for personal travel and private aircraft for official travel. Outside the government, the Trump Organization will have received one asking for a complete accounting of all the payments it has received from foreign governments or foreign-government-owned entities since Donald Trump’s election. Each letter will have been written on stationery bearing the seal of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and signed with Cummings’s looping signature over the word: “Chairman-designate.”

...In September, Pelosi invited Cummings to her Capitol office, along with two other Democratic congressmen who, if the party won the House in November, would become chairmen of committees with powerful investigative mandates: New York’s Jerrold Nadler, of the Judiciary Committee, and California’s Adam Schiff, of the Intelligence Committee. There they were joined by several Democratic representatives who worked previously as prosecutors: Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland and Eric Swalwell of California. Pelosi told the group that they shouldn’t take the outcome of the midterms for granted. At the same time, she said, the Democrats needed to begin thinking about how they would conduct oversight of the Trump administration — and the strategizing needed to start now....

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/magazine/democrats-trump-investigation.html

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. of course they'll hit the ground running

These people know how things work.