Democrats have their marching orders

And if they don't understand that, they'll get left behind while a young, progressive wing takes over like the Tea Party wing of the GOP did a few years back. And that would be fine with me.

Expanding health coverage, reforming our democracy, restoring upward mobility with well-paying jobs, curbing gun violence and moving to repair our immigration system.

Oh, yes, and protecting our constitutional republic from President Trump while rooting out corruption.

This should be the agenda of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Already, some pundits are warning that the new majority will “overreach.”

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The bigger threat is underachievement. Democrats will squander their victory — their largest gain in House seats since 1974 — if they fail to use their power to show what the alternative to Trumpism looks like.

[...]

Yes, many of their ideas will die in the Senate. But Republicans in that increasingly unrepresentative body should be made to pay a high price for thwarting progress.

[...]

This is not about Democrats going “hard left,” a phrase we’ll hear a lot on Fox News. What unites the staunch progressives and their less overtly ideological brethren who won many of last week’s contests is a desire to demonstrate that government, used intelligently, can make life better for the vast majority.

Finding common ground across the center-left, one of the political imperatives of the new majority, does not mean least-common-denominator politics. It means agreeing on steps in the right direction: more people with health care, higher wages and family leave; more with an unimpeded right to vote; more feeling safer from violence; more with confidence that our system is not a cesspool.

  WaPo

You can go as hard left as you want to and you still won't get back to center. So don't start stepping on the movement already.

Democrats are also being counseled against becoming the all-investigations-all-the-time party. But these admonitions assume that the party’s leaders are, well, idiots. It won’t be difficult to use the normal course of House business to hold hearings that expose both the policy failures of the Trump presidency and the corruption he has fostered. Committee chairmen should carefully time the inquiries so that scandals don’t push each other aside and thereby fail to penetrate the public consciousness.

That last bit about timing might be the best advice in this column.

Given the Senate’s sycophancy toward Trump, it falls to the House, the media and lower-court judges to protect us from autocracy. (We’ll learn whether the Supreme Court can live up to its constitutional responsibilities.)

It won't have to. If Trump keeps packing the appeals courts, the Supreme Court won't need to be tested. It can just refuse to hear any cases it doesn't want to overturn.

And, as far as the Senate not passing whatever bills the House sends their way, then so be it. That will give Democrats their 2020 campaign track: Republicans are keeping us from cleaning up the environment, from expanding Medicare, from doing anything about gun violence and climate change, from reforming banking, from getting money out of politics, from making higher education accessible to all, from lowering middle class taxes, etc., etc. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.