Here’s What Senate Democrats Should Be Doing to Fight Trump

We need to bring back that energy, and fast. The good news is, Democratic leaders—under pressure from their constituents, who are demonstrating and calling in to their representatives’ offices in record numbers—have begun to intensify their opposition. Their recent all-night stand against Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget, was a great step. And their increasingly focused messaging on Elon Musk seems to be working, with his approval rating taking a significant dive—more evidence that actually engaging in adversarial politics works; that publicizing and opposing the bad things the administration is doing, rather than preemptively rolling over and giving in, can shift public opinion.

But given the truly unprecedented threat from Musk’s ongoing takeover of the Treasury, these measures aren’t enough. Democrats have additional tactics they can, and must, start deploying. As groups like Indivisible have been highlighting, the U.S. Senate is an institution designed to protect the rights of the minority party. That means Democratic senators have an arsenal of procedural tools they should be weaponizing to disrupt and delay Republicans’ agenda in protest of Musk’s infiltration of our federal payment systems.

Perhaps the most significant tool Democratic senators could use to throw sand in the gears is the denial of unanimous consent. Unanimous consent is the framework by which the Senate operates. Technically, all of the basic day-to-day functions of the Senate—from scheduling votes to moving bills forward—require time-consuming procedural steps like roll-call votes and debates. But senators agree, or unanimously consent, to skip over these processes. If Democrats deny unanimous consent, they can grind Senate business to a crawl.