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House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings speaks with other Democrats at a Jan. 9 news conference to call for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings speaks with other Democrats at a Jan. 9 news conference to call for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Updated at 5:52 p.m. ET

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee want to see White House records on the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his security clearance and his access to classified information.

In a letter to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the oversight panel's 18 Democrats question why Kushner's security clearance hasn't been revoked.

The Democrats say Kushner, one of President Trump's closest advisers, had meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the CEO of a Russian state-owned bank. They say he failed to disclose the meetings as he applied for security clearance and allowed administration officials to say he'd had no such meetings.

"It is unclear why Mr. Kushner continues to have access to classified information while these allegations are being investigated," says the letter, which seeks similar records on former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was asked to resign in February after misleading Vice President Pence about his contacts and conversations with Kislyak during the transition period.

This and other investigative efforts put the Oversight Committee Democrats, led by ranking member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., at the center of a brewing battle over congressional oversight.

The Trump administration has ignored hundreds of congressional letters of inquiry.

It is also brandishing a legal opinion, crafted by the Justice Department, holding that most of Congress lacks the constitutional power to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

It isn't just an attack on Democrats, currently the minority party in both chambers on Capitol Hill.

"This is nonsense," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to Trump earlier this month. Grassley is a champion of strong oversight and has been known to do investigations of executive branch agencies using just his personal staff.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this week dispatched a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsel Don McGahn, accusing the administration of waging "a campaign of increasing secrecy if not dishonesty." The letter was also signed by 25 other House Democrats.

The Justice Department's legal opinion takes a dismissive view toward individual members of Congress. It says the Constitution limits oversight powers the authority to ask executive branch agencies for information on what they're doing to committee chairs. That freezes out even most Republicans, the overwhelming majority of whom don't chair committees and every Democrat on Capitol Hill.

Under this policy, when your local representative writes a letter asking questions about some problem, the agency most likely blows it off.

House Democrats now keep lists of their letters ignored by the administration. The total so far: 260, on issues ranging from infrastructure priorities to possible records of Russian financial ties to President Trump and his family.

In an interview with NPR, Grassley said the administration policy runs counter to "everything that every eighth-grade student has studied about checks and balances of government." Citing language from the presidential oath of office, he said the policy "eliminates the check of most members of Congress to see that the laws are faithfully executed by a president."

An administration spokesman told NPR the White House is reviewing Grassley's letter and looks forward to "a mutual understanding." The statement concluded, however, that the Justice Department document "accurately states the law and the legal obligations" for dealing with congressional requests.

Grassley told NPR that if the Trump White House doesn't act to roll back the policy, Congress can kill it through legislation.

The policy can sound innocuous. "The Justice Department said they should treat individual members of Congress' requests for information as Freedom of Information Act requests like anyone in the public can send in," said Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. "So this is a bit of a subtle change, but it's important."

Not all agency heads are taking as hard a line as the Justice Department. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told a Senate hearing this month that his department would respond to all congressional inquiries, "regardless of who the letter comes from, and it doesn't have to just come from a ranking member or chairman."

Then there's the "seven-member rule," which requires executive branch agencies to deliver any information requested by at least seven members of the House Oversight Committee. The rule dates from 1928 and isn't well-known, but it was most recently invoked just five months ago.

Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., contrasts the administration's position with Trump's "drain the swamp" rhetoric last fall. He told NPR, "They certainly put an emphasis, with this idea of draining the swamp, on accountability and transparency. But so far, they seem to have moved in the complete opposite direction."

The Trump administration may also stumble over the bipartisan institutional loyalties that run deep on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said in an interview, "The idea that the legislative branch would willingly go along with this kind of an assault on its powers by the executive branch runs contrary to the interests of every senator."

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Democrats Seek Records On Jared Kushner As Administration Tries To Stifle Oversight - NPR

For a few hours yesterday, climate science was not the target of attacks in Congress.

Researchers, diplomats and policy experts warned about the dangers of ignoring clear research showing that humans are warming the planet at an alarming rate in an unofficial hearing hosted by Democratic lawmakers.

The discussion was an alternative to the recent hearings in the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, run by Chairman Lamar Smith, the conservative Texas Republican who has accused federal climate scientists of engaging in a global conspiracy. He has subpoenaed researchers whose work negates the idea that climbing temperatures have paused, a key talking point for climate skeptics.

Whereas the Republican-led hearings emphasize, and sometimes exaggerate, uncertainties in climate science, the roundtable yesterday hosted by committee Democrats focused on its alarming findings.

The discussion was meant to show that lawmakers are not yielding the climate discussion to those who reject mainstream science, said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee's ranking member.

We feel very strongly that the persons who believe in the scientific research should have an opportunity to be heard, and not to just sit by and let the skeptics do all the talking just because they're in charge right now, she said.

That such a hearing would be held is a picture of America at this political moment, where scientific research that captures the attention of leaders elsewhere in the world is often viewed with suspicion.

Conservative lawmakers in other countries often recognize the overwhelming science that shows humanity's role in climate change and have signed on to address the challenge of scaling back carbon emissions.

And while climate policy will long be debated by conservatives and liberals, the rejection of its scientific underpinnings seems like a phenomenon that's unique to America, said David O'Sullivan, ambassador of the E.U. delegation to the United States.

Conservatives in other countries have accepted that the science is real and are looking for solutions because in Europe, the debate is over, he said.

There is a much, much greater consensus in Europe about the fact that climate change is a problem, that human intervention is heavily responsible for it and that we need to act to intervene in it to slow that down or correct it, O'Sullivan said. I am sometimes surprised by the liveliness of the debate about whether or not climate change is real or whether human intervention is responsible here in the United States.

Republicans have moved quickly to scale back federal funding for science in recent weeks. The Trump administration proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, and the House Science Committee has advanced legislation that critics say would weaken science used to craft regulations.

Yesterday, U.S. EPA revealed that it was not renewing the terms of dozens of members of its board of scientific advisers, who review legislation. Trump did not cite scientific research when he withdrew the United States from the international Paris climate agreement a few weeks ago, though the agreement was based on science.

Researchers at the hearing said that Trump's past description on global warming as a hoax has damaging consequences. Scientists are now duty-bound to speak out in public to defend their work, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

I don't believe in trickle-down ignorance, that when ignorance is manifest at the highest levels, when words like 'hoax' [and] 'conspiracy' are used right at the top. Those words matter, others hear them. Cutting the funding for science is concerning, but cutting the legitimacy for science, undercutting basic scientific understanding, is just as concerning, he said.

This week, two of Trump's Cabinet secretaries questioned basic climate science. In an interview on CNBC on Monday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry claimed that carbon dioxide emissions are not the primary driver of climate change. Scientists say they are.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made a similar claim earlier this year, even though it's an established basis of climate science that humans are warming the Earth through activity like driving cars.

As the roundtable discussion was being held in the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was in a budget hearing across the street, questioning the accuracy of climate models widely relied upon by researchers.

Democrats acknowledged that there will always be political differences on climate policy, but they said climate science should not be a victim of that fight.

Of all the tragedies of the Trump administration, potentially the greatest is the destruction of our climate science, the withdrawal from Paris, the gutting of the EPA, the appointment of Pruitt and, absent Trump putting us in danger of a nuclear war, the thing that could affect the lives of billions of people on this planet is climate change, and the U.S. has given up its leadership, said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at http://www.eenews.net.

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Democrats Hold Alternative Hearing on Climate Change - Scientific ... - Scientific American

Republicans held on in Tuesday's special election in Georgia, securing a big victory in a much-watched race.

Butas I argued Tuesday, it's easy to overstate the significance of a special election in one out of 435 congressional districts especially a unique one that shifted so bigly between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.And the totality of special elections this year is still painting an increasingly clear picture: Democrats are over-performing, even if they aren't winning the big ones.

Call it moral victories or whatever you want; it's still a form of clear progress.

It's been true in a strong majority of special elections so far this year (except Georgia), from Kansas to Montana to a lower-profile congressional race Tuesday in South Carolina to a slate of state legislative races.

The good folks over at Daily Kos Elections have been tracking it all and comparing the results of each race to the presidential race in that district in November, where available. And thus far, Democrats have done better than Hillary Clinton in 17 out of 23 races and better than President Obama in 2012 in 16 of 23.

Here's how that looks compared to 2016, courtesy of Daniel Donner:

This is especially notable because (a) Clinton and Obama both won the popular vote and (b) it's not always the case. Over the preceding three years, in fact, Democrats did worse than Clinton in about 73 percent of special elections:

And if you look at that first chart, you'll notice that Republicans only substantially beat the presidential numbers in one out of 23 races a state Senate race in Connecticut while their other overperformances were all pretty close, within 5 points or less of the 2012 presidential race. Democrats, meanwhile, are beating Clinton's numbers by substantial margins in most of these districts.

You may recall the Kansas special election where they lost by just 7 points in a district Clinton lost by 29 a pretty big surprise at the time. But that's actually only in the middle of the pack as far as races where they've overperformed. In five other state legislative races (five of just 23 on this list total), they over-performed Clinton's numbers by even more than that. And they have beaten Clinton's margins by double digits in13 out of 23 races total more than half.

In congressional races, they've beaten Clinton's margins by 21 points in Kansas, 14 points in Montana and 15 points in South Carolina, while underperforming Clinton by two points in Georgia.

A big problemwith the intense focus and spending on special elections is that there are so many unique factors. Not only was Georgia's 6th district the sixth-most Democratic-shifting district in the 2016 presidential election, but we also had unique candidates, a unique election format and a rainstorm on the day of the runoff. All of these things allow for well-meaning people to draw different conclusions about what Karen Handel's win means for the political landscape.

But once you start including more special elections in more districts, those unique variables in each district matter less and we get more of a sense for which side's voters are more enthusiastic and which side is doing a better job of persuasion nationwide. Right now, that's the Democrats.

A big reason they haven't won the big one is that all of the big ones have been fought in conservative territory. They took a big shot Tuesday and lost, but the trend is clear.

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Special elections are still painting a good picture for Democrats, overall - Washington Post

Democratic strength is not surprising, since all of the ingredients for a strong Democratic performance are in place. The presidents party just about always loses seats in the midterm elections, and it generally gets clobbered when the presidents approval rating is beneath 50 percent, much less beneath 40.

But alone, a strong national political environment doesnt guarantee Democratic control of the House.

The Democrats just dont have many top-tier opportunities to win Republican-held seats. This year, just 11 Republicans represent seats with a Democratic tilt in recent presidential elections. Back in 2010, the Republicans had 73 such opportunities.

They dont need to win most of those districts, but they need to win enough.

Lean Rep. (6085% Rep.)

Likely Rep. (8595% Rep.)

Lean Rep. (6085% Rep.)

Likely Rep. (8595% Rep.)

The election in 2006 is a particularly relevant example, because Democrats had a somewhat similar, if better, set of opportunities. Those chances yielded 31 seats, just a few more than the 24 seats they need in 2018. But Democrats also had some good luck in 2006 that will be hard to duplicate: There were a half dozen safely Republican districts where the incumbent succumbed to scandal or indictment, including Tom DeLay, a House majority leader.

The Republicans have a real shot to retain control of the House in a political climate that would doom them under typical circumstances. There are a lot of reasons for this structural G.O.P. advantage, like partisan gerrymandering, the inefficient distribution of Democrats in heavily Democratic cities, and the benefit of incumbency.

To retake the House, Democrats will ultimately need to carry seats with a clear Republican tradition. This years special elections, including Jon Ossoffs loss to Karen Handel in Georgia, are a reminder that it will indeed be difficult for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning districts, just as it was for the Democrats in 2006 or for Republicans on Democratic-leaning turf in 2010.

The good news for Democrats is that they dont need to win all of these Republican-leaning districts or even most of them. Democrats might only need to win, say, 17 of the 60 seats where Republicans are favored, but where Democrats have a realistic chance.

In that sense, these Democratic losses are entirely consistent with the possibility of a House takeover. If Democrats keep running ahead of expectations across those plausibly competitive Republican-held seats, many seats will ultimately fall their way. But they will certainly lose more than they win. The question is whether they win enough, and no special election offers the answer to that.

An earlier version of this article misstated the position of Tom DeLay in the 2006 election cycle. He was a House majority leader, not House Speaker.

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Dueling Realities for Democrats: Big Gains but Large Obstacles in ... - New York Times

Blue Dog Democrats huddled with the leading members of President Trumps economic team on Tuesday in the Capitol, where the lawmakers pressed the administration to seek bipartisan reforms to the nations tortuous tax code.

Just 18-members strong, the centrist Blue Dogs compose a tiny voice in the clamorous House, vastly outnumbered by even the liberals in their own caucus. But with GOP leaders struggling to rally their divided conference around big-ticket legislation, the Blue Dogs see themselves potentially stepping into the mix to broker a bipartisan deal for the sake of getting tax reform to Trumps desk this year.

If its constructive, if theyre genuinely interested in ideas and making it a bipartisan effort, then the Blue Dogs are certainly willing to participate, said Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), a member of the group.

Youve got the far left, youve got the far right, and the Blue Dogs are in the center. And basically, we want a tax code thats efficient [and] that works for everybody.

With that in mind, the Blue Dogs met Tuesday evening with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House chief economic advisor Gary Cohn and Marc Short, the president's director of legislative affairs, to press a simple, two-pronged message: First, for tax reform to be sustainable, it must be bipartisan; second, the Blue Dogs are willing to help.

The message is that were willing to participate and give input if, infact,its going to be a bipartisan process that ultimately is going to work for the good of the Republic, Bishop said.

Theyre interested in input because they recognize that it needs to be a bipartisan effort if its going to succeed. And they want it to succeed.

How the Republicans go about the process, however, remains an open question.

GOP leaders in both chambers are hoping to rally their Republican troops behind a tax package that wont require any Democratic votes a message amplified by Speaker Paul RyanPaul RyanThe Memo: Five Takeaways from Georgias special election EXCLUSIVE: Blue Dog Democrats meet with top Trump aides on tax reform Dem who launched bid against Paul Ryan raises 100k in first day of campaign MORE (R-Wis.) on Tuesday.

Once in a generation or so, there is an opportunity to do something transformational something that will have a truly lasting impact long after we are gone, Ryan, a former Ways and Means chairman whos fought for years to rewrite the tax code, said during a speech before the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) in Washington.

That moment is here and we are going to meet it.

Thus far, however, Ryan and the Republicans are divided over the policy specifics of their various tax plans, particularly when it comes to an import tax that Ryan backs but Trump and many other Republicans reject.

Furthermore, going the partisan route will require the Republicans to adopt a 2018 budget bill that includes procedural language, known as reconciliation, that would allow them to move a tax package through the Senate with just a simple majority. That budget bill is on hold while the Republicans attempt to pass their ObamaCare repeal bill, which is slated for a Senate vote next week.

The Blue Dogs are eying the healthcare vote with particular interest because they think it will likely dictate both the tenor of the subsequent tax debate and the extent of their influence over it.

If healthcare reform passes on a party-line vote via reconciliation, they say, there will likely be less appetite for Republicans to reach across the aisle for Democratic votes on tax reform.

If anything, its going to create an incentive for them to continue doing things in the [partisan] way that they have done, said a senior aide close to the Blue Dogs.

If, on the other hand, the Republicans healthcare bill fails to reach Trumps desk, GOP leaders may feel increasing pressure to score a legislative victory on a major issue, and theyll face a heightened urgency to get tax reform across the finish line, even if that means compromising with moderate Democrats to get it done.

If healthcare goes down there arent a lot of places that I can see that the Trump administration doesnt turn on congressional Republicans for not having healthcare passed, and theyre going to want a big win, said a second senior aide aligned with the Blue Dogs.

Its the second scenario where the Blue Dogs think they could step in and work with the Republicans to secure the sweeping tax reforms that have eluded Congress since the Reagan administration.

The Democratic aides said Trump officials favor a bipartisan approach to tax reform that would eliminate the need for reconciliation, but expressed concerns that theyd lack the votes in the Senate, where eight Democrats would have to cross the aisle to defeat a likely filibuster from more liberal senators.

In reality, according to them, they said the political landscape is very toxic and that theyre having a tough time identifying eight Democratic senators who would be on board for something like this, said the first Democratic aide.

The first aide singled out four points on which the Democrats and the White House appear to agree: Any tax reform package must spur economic growth; reduce rates for middle-income workers; broaden the revenue base; and lower corporate rates. The Blue Dogs also stressed to Mnuchin and Cohn that they want the package to be deficit neutral a goal Ryan shares, since adding to the deficit under reconciliation rules would cause new tax cuts to expire after a decade.

"Businesses need to have confidence that we wont pull the rug out from under them," Ryan said.

The Blue Dogs, meanwhile, are vowing to press ahead. Last week, they wrote to tax-reform stakeholders on K Street, urging the groups to oppose a strictly partisan approach to this years debate.

Reforming our tax system must be done in the most responsible and sustainable way and that means it must be bipartisan, Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), one of three Blue Dog co-chairmen, wrote in the June 15th letter.

The Blue Dogs are also busy drafting a set of tax-reform principles, which they intend to release before the Republicans move to the issue in full.

In a separate meeting on Tuesday, Cohn said the White House expects Congress to launch the tax debate in September, after Congress returns from its long August recess.

Ryan was less ambitious about that timeline, saying his personal goal is to get it done by opening day at gun deer season meaning late November. But his goals for the policy itself remain sky-high.

We are going to fix this nation's tax code once and for all, he said.

The Blue Dog Democrats are hoping to be a part of that process.

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EXCLUSIVE: Blue Dog Democrats meet with top Trump aides on tax reform - The Hill