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National politics are impacting the special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District. (The Washington Post)

When the Senate confirmed Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) in February as President Trump's health and human services secretary, few in Washington thought that, come June, the president would need to urge people to vote Republican in the special election to replace Price.

But it's Election Day in Georgia, and look at this:

Even though he spelled the Republican's last name wrong in that third (now deleted) tweet, the fact he's tweeting at all about this race underscores that what was supposed to be a quiet, humid special election in an upper middle-class Atlanta suburb to replace Price has turned into a battle. And both sides say it's a 50/50 contest.

That alone is remarkable. The Republicans have held Georgia's 6th Congressional Districtsince the 1970s and, really, since the political realignment of the South.

But Republicans are at risk of losing it in the era of Trump to a 30-year-old Democrat with no legislative experience, Jon Ossoff. Ossoff has a slight lead in the polls, but operatives on the ground in Georgia on both sides say this race could come down to a few votes between him and the GOP candidate, former Georgia secretary of state Karen Handel. A recount is possible.

The logical question is: Why? Why is this race suddenly so competitive?

The admittedly unsatisfying answer is: It's hard to tell.

Special elections can be particularly useful tea leavesfor studying the national mood, said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan elections analyst and columnist at The Washington Post. Most voters aren't paying much attention to the candidates when they go tovote, which means they're probably thinking big picture.

When they think about choices, they tend to think big choices: change versus status quo, Rothenberg said. Keep the president, or send a message of dissatisfaction to the president.

[What can Georgia tell us about Trump? A guide to punditing like a pro]

Or this special election could be just that: special, without any meaning beyond Georgia. Here are afew not-mutually-exclusive theories from Democrat and Republican operatives, both about the dynamics of this particular race and the national mood. Any one of these theories could either all be right or all wrong or somewhere in between:

1. Establishment Republican voters are sick of Trump: This is a Republican district (Price won it by 24 points in November), but it's not a Trump district (Trump won it by around a percentage point). Now it's possible those same Republicans who voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton decide they want to send a message to Trump and send a Democratic candidate to check him, Rothenberg said.

Overlay that onto the fact that Democrats in special elections in GOP districts inKansas and Montana did better than expected this spring, and you could have a trend.

2. Moderate and liberal Democrats woke up: There are more Republicans than Democrats in this district, but it's possible that Democrats are so motivated by what they see happening in Washington they are campaigning and voting and engaging in politics as if they live in a swing district. This would be the dream scenario for Democrats, who hope that the fact this race is competitive portends that many, many more seats in the 2018 midterm elections will also be competitive. There are more than 70 seats that are more competitive than this race, according to rankings by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

We can win everywhere, said Alejandro Chavez, senior electoral campaign manager for the progressive group Democracy for America. We just have to compete everywhere.

3. There's been so much national attention that its competitiveness was inevitable: You can make almost any race competitive when it sets records as the most expensive House race in the nation. Ossoff raised a mind-boggling $20 million in the past three months.

And outside groups on both sides have spent millions. Thousands are knocking on doors and making phone calls for the candidates. You'd have to work harder in Georgia NOT to pay attention to this race than to pay attention.

Republicans are heartened by that. Come November 2018, Democrats (and their donors) will have to divide all this effort up by 20 or 30 districts next year. (Democrats have a list of 70 seats they hope to make competitive, and they need to net 24 seats to take back the House of Representatives.)

4. The candidates weren't great: I guarantee you this: Whoever loses will get cast by operatives in their party as a so-so candidate who lost the race for them. (Politics is a contact sport, people.) Handel in particular is vulnerable to this criticism. She failed to beat Ossoff outright in the first round of voting in April, and she failed to clear the field of the other 16+ GOP candidates who were running in April.

For now, all we know is that the special election to replace Price is surprisingly competitive.

We won't be able to truly answer why until this race is long over andwe've tested these above hypotheses in the 2018 midterm elections.

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As Trump's tweets underscore, Democrats could win this Georgia special election - Washington Post

Though I have lived for 30 years in Montana, I grew up in Texas, inculcated with the story of the Alamo, where the heroes Travis, Bowie, Crockett and Austin; 186 men, one woman, two babies fought Santa Annas Mexican army of 10,000 for 13 days, inflicting heavy casualties and buying time for Sam Houston to muster at San Jacinto, where, less than a month later, the Texan volunteers wrested the land we now call Texas away from Mexican rule. A loss for a gain the sacrifice play.

In Montana, on May 25, in a special election to fill the states single House seat vacated by the newly appointed secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, state Democrats shaved 14.5 percentage points off Donald Trumps showing in November, turning out for candidate Rob Quist. Despite that remarkable reversal, Republicans held the Montana seat. Quist lost to billionaire Greg Gianforte by 6 percentage points. Perhaps the most telling stat from Quists campaign was this: 95% of his contributions were for $200 or less.

In other words, national Democrats barely showed up for this race. They werent savvy enough, or they just didnt care enough, to recognize that even a few hundred thousand dollars more, combined with despair over Trump and the rarity of a special election, might have switched this heartland prairie seat from red to blue.

That amount of money would have been chump change compared with what the Democratic Party has lavished on another similar special election, Tuesdays similar special election in Georgia, where Jon Ossoff is trying to flip a House seat in a traditionally Republican suburban Atlanta district. One Georgia-Montana comparison is instructive: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has invested $5 million in Ossoffs run; the DCCC kicked in about $500,000 to aid Quist.

Those figures raise this question: Which is more valuable, a seat in Congress that represents suburban elites, or a seat that represents the newly prized flyover voter, in this case gun-owning nurses and tractor-driving PhDs., city refugees and fifth-generation ranchers, the third-largest landmass in the Lower 48, a sprawling energy and agriculture state with a deep tradition of support for what Democrats once were leaders in: big-hearted, pragmatic populism suited to the rural and urban enclaves of the New West (and maybe even the New South)?

I think the appropriate answer in a democracy should be neither, but the national Democratic Party made a clear choice.

Im a Democrat. I even like to think of myself as a good Democrat, and I do not like to think of myself as one who points fingers in defeat. But I also like to think of myself as someone who learns from a mistake, and I would hope national Democrats would do the same: Fight with something like equal firepower for every seat, every time.

Hindsights 20-20, but early on especially, national Republicans in Montana supported Gianforte far beyond what the Democrats did for Quist (according to NPR, Gianforte got five times more outside money than Quist).

I found Gianfortes verbal spew more abusive than even his physical violence he choked and punched a journalist just before the election. Day after blessed day during the campaign, I went up to my rural mailbox and opened it to find a new oversized postcard a photo-shopped portrait of Quist, a sweet and good man, stomping his country-and-western boot heels on pictures of smiling foursquare Anglo families, or blowing up mountaintops with dynamite, or dressed in vampire garb and in cahoots with a cackling Nancy Pelosi, both grinning fiendishly as they destroyed Montana values.

Montana values, indeed. It was enough to make one sick.

Timing is everything in politics. I submit that the special election in Montana was a big thing, not just in Montana but nationally; that it was worth going all in not just because the seat was winnable but to support issues like the protection of public lands and to make a stand in flyover country for sweet reason. If you believe Trump must be countered to protect national and global security, then the Montana vote was as much a crucial referendum as the vote in Georgia. Yet, as with the Alamo, sufficient reinforcements didnt show up.

Rage is unpredictable, and damned near impossible to sustain; it tends to ultimately consume and destroy the vessels that house it. The time, then, is now. Was now. Yet the national resources flowed to Georgia, not Montana. They flowed to the old model of urban Democrat rather than the struggling middle-lander, the rural guy who can speak the language of Trump voters.

Democratic brothers and sisters: If you win in Georgia taking just one slender House seat, instead of the two you might have had remember Montanas sacrifice.

And Ossoff if you become Rep. Ossoff, you will have an obligation to your district of 92,000 (approximately one-tenth the population of Montanas single at-large House district) but also the residents of Big Sky Country.

Remember, please, a battle fought with scant outside help, nearly 3,000 miles away, on almost nothing but guts and glory. Be humble, be helpful. Our loss will be your victory.

Author Rick Bass brought together 40 Montana writers in support of Rob Quists candidacy, with a website and printed anthology titled We Take Our Stand.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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Even with a win in Georgia Tuesday, Democrats lose they could have had two seats for the price of one - Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump is a historically unpopular president, and Republicans in Congress are pushing through a remarkably unpopular agenda. Under such auspicious circumstances, its only natural for ardent Democrats to feel energized and empowered. Some see 2018 as their own Tea Party moment to sweep even the bluest of candidates to victory in the reddest of districts. It looks like an election Democrats cant losethe sort Americans havent seen since, well, last year.

Republicans Will Continue to Stick With Secrecy as Long as It Works

So how can Democrats ensure that 2018 delivers the success they failed to achieve in 2016? The stakes are too high to rely entirely on one sides enthusiasm or the other sides disenchantment. If their overriding objective in 2018 is to save the country, not realign the Democratic Party, Democrats need to look back to the last time they won back the House in 2006. We helped coordinate that effort, and the lessons we learned then still apply today. Waves dont happen on their own: Democrats need a strategy, an argument, and a plan for what theyll do if they win.

In the last 60 years, control of the U.S. House of Representatives has changed hands just three times, always in midterm elections, with control shifting away from the presidents party. The 1994 and 2010 campaigns were dominated by attacks against the incumbent president and his party over health care; 2006 became a referendum over the ruling partys incompetence and corruption. In percentage terms, the worst midterm defeat in the past century came in 1974, when a nation weary of obstruction of justice sent a quarter of the House Republican caucus packing. Some presidents are unfortunate enough to face one of these circumstances; with the midterms still more than a year away, Donald Trump already seems to have all those bases covered.

Opposition parties, by contrast, find the odds forever in their favor. In the last 20 midterm elections, the presidents party has picked up seats only twice: in 2002, when Republicans gained eight right after 9/11, and in 1998, when Democrats gained five thanks to House Republicans obsession with impeachment.

Trump and his party have particular reason to fear a reckoning in 2018. No first-term president has gone into a midterm this unpopular since Harry Truman lost 55 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate in 1946. Like Democrats in 1994 and 2010, Republicans in 2018 face a firestorm over health care. If Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, and the Jack Abramoff scandal dogged congressional Republicans in 2006, Trump is already torturing them with incompetence and corruption of unprecedented scale. Add potential electoral devastation to the list of Trump mistakes Republicans cant prevent. Donald Trump came to Washington to make wavesand he may deliver a wave election powerful enough to sweep his party out of control of Congress.

Democrats enter the cycle with a distinct advantage. For campaigners in chief, the toughest race to win is when theyre the name in voters sights but not the name on the ballot. Trump will be an exceptional liability on the campaign traildetermined to redeem himself, desperate for validation from his base, and toxic to every candidate in a marginal race. Trump presents vulnerable Republicans with a no-win proposition: They cant run with him and their Democratic opponents wont let them run without him. The last thing a majority of voters want is to give this president a blank checkor as Trump prefers to call it, loyalty.

So Democrats dont need to spend the next year navel-gazing over how to motivate their base. In 2018, Trump will provide the greatest fundraising and get-out-the-vote machine the party has ever had. Wave elections are a chance to build on that base by winning back voters disappointed in the other side. Democrats will have plenty of disappointments to bring to their attention, including Republican health-care and tax-cut plans that betray the working-class voters who put Trump in the White House.

To pull that off, though, Democrats must channel their anger, not be defined by it. In 1994, Gingrich Republicans used an alternative agenda, the Contract with America, to take back the House for the first time in 40 years. In 1998, those same Gingrich Republicans played to their conservative base by campaigning for impeachment, producing another historic result: making Bill Clinton the first president in 176 years to gain House seats in the sixth year of his presidency. Democrats should heed that same lesson. They dont have to make 2018 a referendum on Trumps impeachment. If they want to win the majority they need in order to hold Trump accountable, theyll do much better making the election a referendum on Trumps record.

That referendum will be won or lost in swing districtsand they are much harder to find than they used to be. The Cook Political Report found that the number of swing seatswhere neither party runs more than 5 points better than it does nationallyhas dropped by more than half over the last 20 years, from 164 to 72. The most vulnerable seats in the current House majority belong to 23 Republican incumbents in districts Hillary Clinton carried, largely clustered in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington. These districts tend to be mainstream in tone and interest. Thats a tough place to win the hand Trump has dealt Republicans of cutting student aid, denying climate change, and eliminating protections for pre-existing conditions.

But Democrats dont just need to choose the right battles, they also need to choose credible candidates who can win them. Candidate quality may not make the difference in a place like Montanas at-large district, where Greg Gianforte won handily just hours after assaulting a reporter. Winning hotly contested swing seats, however, requires candidates who closely match their districtseven if they dont perfectly align with the national partys activist base. In 2006, the Democratic base was energized and angry, but then as now, capturing a majority required winning some tough races in red and purple states across the heartland. As leaders in that 2006 effort, we recruited a football player in North Carolina, a businessman in Florida, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania, and a sheriff in Indiana. The Democratic Party won twice as many seats as it needed to gain control.

Theres a long-term payoff for a party that gets this right. Good candidates not only help build a wave, they help sustain it. Wave elections offer the chance to establish new beachheads in hostile territory, but it takes gifted leaders to survive when the pendulum swings back. In the 1980 Reagan landslide, Republicans gained 34 House seatsonly to lose 26 seats two years laterand 12 Senate seats, only to lose 8 senators and Senate control when those seats came open six years later. With the right candidates, the impact of a wave can be felt for decades. Half a dozen Watergate babies elected to the House in 1974 went on to serve in the Senate. So have three Democrats who joined the House in the 2006 wave.

Even with the right candidates in the right districts, a wave wont get far without a credible plan to address the countrys problems, not simply run attack ads against the parade of horribles from the other side. In 2006, we published a book called The Plan, which offered detailed proposals on college, retirement, health care, and the economy. One reason todays congressional Republicans are struggling to enact an agenda is that unlike the Contract-with-America Republicans of 1994, the GOP waves of 2010 and 2014 were built only on saying no to Obama.

Donald Trump may hand Democrats the election next year, but Democrats should strive to earn the peoples trust on their own merits anyway. These are serious times for a country at the mercy of an unserious president. The damage may take years to repair, and voters deserve to know what Democrats are going to do about it.

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How the Democrats Can Take Back Congress - The Atlantic

Bernie Sanders addresses an audience during a rally in Boston. (AP Photo / Steven Senne)

Politics aint bean-bag, said Mr. Dooley, a character created by the humorist Finley Peter Dunne (d. 1936). But it also aint horseshoesin other words: Close dont count.

For progressives, especially those who see the Democratic Party as the only plausible vehicle for achieving political power, the combination of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and Hillary Clintons shocking defeat in November heralded a power shift within that party. Sanders, an out-of-left-field rebel, energized the left, Democratic activists, independents, and many othersmillennials, young single womendisenchanted with the business-as-usual Democratic Party, and he showed that it was possible to challenge the partys establishment and raise hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations on the Internet. Meanwhile, Clintons ignominious defeat seemed to put an exclamation point on the failure of that establishment.

But, as recent elections in New Jersey and Virginiaalong with the hard-fought race for chair of the Democratic National Committeeshow, that establishment isnt going down without a fight. Even Hillary Clinton, after a brief pause to wander in the woods, is back. And while the special election in Georgia today could elevate a Democrat, Jon Ossoff, to the House, Ossoff is solidly a member of the Democratic establishment.

Despite an array of new resistance groups, the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party has yet to win much.

So, despite the emergence of a multi-hued, self-starting array of resistance groups that has emerged since the election of Donald J. Trump, the Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic Party has yet to win much. In Montana, a Sanders-backed insurgent Democrat, Rob Quist, lost his bid for a House seat on May 25, while getting virtually no support from the Washington-based Democratic Party.

In the DNC race, the Clinton-Obama establishment closed ranks to guarantee that the Sanders-allied Representative Keith Ellison was shut out, getting the consolation prize of being named to the powerless post of deputy DNC chair.

And in the two most important contests this year, the twin races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, progressives mounted strong challenges to the partys anointed onesand lost. Each of these races had earlier been touted as a possible turning point in the establishments ability to control the party after the 2016 debacle, and in each case that turning point, well, turned the other way. These uncomfortable results have crucial implications for the left-liberal challenge to the center-right in the party.

In New Jersey, Phil Murphy won the Democratic nomination on June 6 with 48 percent of nearly half a million votes cast, beating an array of four more progressive candidates, including Jim Johnson and John Wisniewski, who garnered about 22 percent each. Both Wisniewski, a longtime assemblyman whod chaired Sanderss campaign in New Jersey and whod been endorsed by Jeff Weaver of Our Revolution, the organizing spinoff from Bernies presidential campaign, and Johnson, an African-American lawyer whod served as a US Treasury under secretary and whod chaired the Brennan Center for Justice, drew enthusiastic support from many progressives. But both knew it was a steep uphill climb.

Murphy, who spent 23 years as a banker at Goldman Sachs, is a multimillionaire, and he spent lavishly over the two years before the race to scare off other establishment challengers and secure the support of the New Jersey Democratic organization. Every single prominent state politician, including both US senators and all 21 county chairs, dutifully lined up behind Murphy. The support of the county chairs gave Murphy the regular Democratic organization line on every ballot, considered to be worth as much as 20 percent of the vote right off the bat. And Murphys own cash overwhelmed the resources of his opponents, a task made easier by the fact that the two leading progressives split the anti-Murphy vote.

In Virginia, Ralph Northam, the designated heir of current Governor Terry McAuliffethe crony of the Clintons who got his start as the Macker, a fast-talking fundraiser among millionaires and billionaires in the late 1980shandily beat (56 to 44 percent) an upstart challenger, Tom Perriello. Northam, a throwback to the courtly old Virginia gentlemanwho had voted for George W. Bush, twice!scrambled to present himself as a progressive of sorts, even running an ad calling Trump a narcissistic maniac when he finally twigged to the fact that the Democratic base was fired up in opposition to the pussy grabber in chief.

Perriello, meanwhile, a former member of Congress who angered the state party pooh-bahs by deciding to run late last year, secured the backing of Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Our Revolution. As in New Jersey, the party smartly saluted. Every Democratic member of the Virginia legislature endorsed Mr. Northam, as did county chairmen in the states 95 counties and 38 independent cities, The Wall Street Journal reported, adding that voters rejected the extreme elements that have animated their [party] since Mr. Trumps election.

Supporters of Perriello, Wisniewski, and Johnson may have comforted themselves by pointing to the fact that neither Murphy nor Northam ran as center-right, New Democratlike politicians. Indeed, in 2017, to do so might have been political hara-kiri, since the Democratic electorate isnt in the mood to buy it. But its specious to claim that well-lubricated, moneyed, establishment pols have adopted anything more than protective coloration when it comes to support for various planks in the Sanders-Warren platform. In 2016, some Sanders supporters and various pundits correctly noted that Clinton began to mimic Sanders on some issues, sort of (see: minimum wage, college costs, etc.).

But in the end, a neoliberal is, well, a neoliberal. When neoliberal push comes to economic-downturn shove, Clinton, Murphy, Northam, and their ilk usually resort to talking about tax cuts, budgetary restraint, shared pain, and so on. (For instance, back in 2005, when Murphy led a state panel designed to come up with solutions to a burgeoning state budget logjam, his solution was straight from the neoliberal playbook: pension and benefit cuts for state employees.) They dust off the old Democratic Leadership Council handbook and reread Bill Clintons Era-of-Big-Government-Is-Over speech.

Sanders himself, properly eschewing any talk of an independent or third-party option, in speech after speech since November has consistently sounded like an Old Testament prophet is saying that theres no alternative to the complete transformation of the Democratic Party. In his June 13 op-ed in The New York Times, he wrote, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction. I may be wrong, but I dont think Sanders means that the Murphys and Northams of the party have to join Our Revolution; instead, Sandersand the myriad parts of the resistance, the millions whove joined march after march since January 21, who flocked to airports spontaneously to protest Trumps Muslim ban, who have created 6,000 Indivisible groups and thousands of other grassroots movementswants a bottom-up insurgency to take control of the party and move it leftward.

The Democratic establishment views grassroots activists as both a potential ally against the GOP and a potential threat.

The outcome of the Sanders-Clinton battle, the DNC race, and the votes in New Jersey and Virginia show how hard that will be to accomplish. And we have to acknowledge that a defeat is a defeat. An entrenched establishment, with vast funds at its disposal and a self-perpetuating, bureaucratic flowchart at the national, state, and local levels, wont go down without a fight. As the grassroots, anti-Trump forces move toward 2018, they had better realize that the Democratic Party establishment views them in equal measure as a force that can help knock off Republicans and as an alarming insurgency that might knock them off, too.

A recent survey by In These Times concluded that in six statesKentucky, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washingtonthe state party is in the hands of leaders backed by Our Revolution. In Californiayes, another defeata party organization rapidly moving left nearly elected Kimberly Ellis, effectively representing the Sanders-Warren wing, over Eric Bauman, a party insider, as state party chair. In state after stateand, less noticed, in county after county, congressional district after districtits a war with hundreds of fronts. Going into 2018, 2020, and beyond, the real question is: Will insurgents take over the party, and run progressives in local primaries, or will the party co-optor crushthe insurgency?

In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the insurgents are hardly giving up. On June 14, a loose, ad hoc coalition of some 30 groups across six South Jersey counties convened a Flag Day Summit outdoor picnic and rally in Mays Landing, organized around a challenge to Representative Frank LoBiondo, a longtime incumbent Republican member of Congress in New Jerseys Second District, which spans most of the states southern half. Among the groups represented were Atlantic County Young Democrats, We the People of Salem and Cumberland Counties, Our Revolution South Jersey, Down Jersey, Indivisible Cape May County, Long Beach Island Progressives, Women Get Shit Done, Egg Harbor Indivisible, and many others, representing thousands of people. One of the groups, Progressive Coalition for NJ-2, is actively seeking to recruit a challenger to LoBiondo in 2018, whos looking increasingly vulnerable. (President Obama won the district twice, and in 2016 it barely went to Trump.)

But looming over that race is the Democratic establishment, most notably represented by George Norcross, widely acknowledged to be South Jerseys political boss, whose brother, Donald Norcross, is the Democratic congressman representing the district just to the north, NJ-1. On June 1, George Norcross led a fundraiser, joined by Alec Baldwin, which pulled in a neat $5.1 million for Norcrosss General Majority PAC. The insurgents, organizing county by county, might soon find themselves face-to-face with a well-financed, Norcross-backed party hack. If that contest happens, it and countless others like it across the country will determine if indeed the party will change direction in the way Sanders suggests.

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Why It's So Hard for Insurgent Democrats to Defeat the Party's Old ... - The Nation.

Capitol Hill Democrats escalated their broadsides against President Trumps role as businessman-in-chief on Tuesday, accusing the billionaire president of profiting illegally from private dealings with foreign dignitaries.

Led by Sen. Richard BlumenthalRichard BlumenthalDemocrats tout suit on Trumps foreign business connections Overnight Finance: Ryan seeks manufacturing muscle for tax reform | Warren targets Wells Fargo board | Senators raise concerns over Russian takeover of Citgo | Pelosi hits GOP for budget delays Live coverage: Senate Dems hold talkathon to protest GOP health plan MORE (D-Conn.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the Democrats contend that Trump, by refusing to extract himself fully from the global business empire he commanded before taking office, has violated a section of the Constitution barring federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign leaders without congressional approval.

On Tuesday, a handful of lawmakers gathered in the basement of the Capitol to press their case. If there was any mystery about the direction they were headed, the sign on the podium quickly put it to rest.

The bottom line is that we have no clue as to most of the investments and partnerships of Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDaily Mail editor pulls out of talks for White House job Pavlich: Trumps best speech Trump: China 'has not worked out' on North Korea MORE around the world because he has made no disclosures, said Blumenthal, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committees Constitution subcommittee.

The American people have a right to know if the president of the United States is putting the national interests before his own.

Last week, almost 200 Democrats representing both congressional chambers filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of leveraging his political stature to churn profits, including payments from foreign dignitaries newly eager to stay at Trumps name-branded hotels around the world.

That arrangement, the Democrats charge, violates the Constitutions emoluments clause, which proclaims that no Person holding any Office shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Blumenthal, the lead plaintiff in the suit, said Trumps refusal to disclose his taxes has made the suit necessary.

We cannot consent to what we dont know, he said.

Also last week, the attorneys general in Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a suit contesting what they consider to be similar conflicts of interest by the president. A third suit, filed earlier in the year on behalf of businesses alleging they compete with Trumps own, is also working its way through the courts.

The Democrats in Congress think their challenge may stand the best chance, because the Constitution grants the legislative branch the explicit responsibility of sanctioning any foreign gifts.

The suit has attracted the endorsement of 196 lawmakers 166 House members and 30 senators, according to Conyers. None of them are Republicans.

Trump was right when he said theres a cloud over his presidency, Conyers said. But its his own cloud.

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Democrats tout suit on Trump's foreign business connections - The Hill