Dear Representative Lee:

I’m writing to express my heartfelt congratulations for your re-election. Fact is, while it wasn’t going to take a blue tsunami to return you to the House1, it is a nice circumstance. And I was definitely going to vote for you anyway: one of the advantages of it having been Squirrel Hill that I left for Zürich-Höngg eighteen years ago is that I’m frozen in time in the 14th Ward of Pittsburgh for electoral purposes.

less of this sort of thing

I understand Tuesday’s results as an overwhelming repudiation of authoritarian impunity and rampant corruption. I suspect you share this view, given your record:

Noem has since been fired (she is now a special envoy), as has Bondi (she is, we’re told, off to the private sector). This remains, as far as I can tell, the only accountability anyone in this administration has yet faced.

This is not just me talking; this is me talking to friends in Oakland (Allegheny County, Pennsylvania), in Oakland (Alameda County, California), and among my little community of Americans abroad here in Switzerland. Maybe I’m just hanging out with the right people, but nobody in any of my circles thinks reconciliation with the Trump regime and the Republicans who have not yet abandoned it is a winning strategy. It’s not 1877. We don’t need to compromise.

While people are indeed angry for kitchen-table reasons, it is not clear to me that we yet have broad consensus as a country on solutions to those problems. Immediate relief in the form of reversing Trump’s disastrous tariffs, and ending corruption’s drain on the treasury, yes. But a more durable consensus about the role of government in building an economy for everyone can only be built when people see results from legislation, which, frankly, will take a Democratic trifecta in 2028 to achieve well. We need to make sure we get that trifecta. But people are even angrier for corruption reasons, and there is broad consensus on the solution here: the rule of law must be reestablished, and some people are going to have to go to prison. I’ve been waiting on this for a while: my hope “that any of the war criminals of 2003 or the straight-up Wall Street criminal-criminals of 2008 would see the inside of a prison” died a decade and a half ago. 2021 makes three times we’ve run this experiment. We can do better, and we need your help.

trying and failing is the job

All of this is why I am unenthusiastic about Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the House of Representatives. On Wednesday he told reporters “I haven’t had a single member of the House Democratic caucus talk to me about impeachment.” On Friday, asked directly whether Pete Hegseth should be impeached, he called him “the most unqualified secretary of defense in American history” and then said “I don’t want to get out ahead of the caucus”, 140 members of which voted last December against killing the impeachment of the President. The same report mentions that Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has threatened to force a floor vote on eight articles against Hegseth. A prospective Speaker of a sweeping Democratic majority should not be finding himself to the right of Thomas Massie on the question of whether the Secretary of Defense answers to anyone.

I will not ask you not to support Jeffries. However, your support should be contingent on a commitment to proudly and publicly bring the entirety of the investigative capacity of the House to bear on every single illegal action of this administration, including impeachments of Senate-confirmed and elected officials, even when these are not likely to succeed for reasons of Senate calculus. The caucus elects its leadership on November 18.

This calculus is not great, but no longer hopeless. As of this writing the incoming Senate has 54 Democrats. I’m optimistic (to the point of giddiness) about Scott Colom2, which gets us 55. Mary Peltola might get us to 56 by the end of November. Discount one for (your constituent, if I’m not mistaken about PA-12’s boundaries) John Fetterman3, and a conviction needs somewhere between twelve and fourteen Republicans. This will be easier for some impeachments than others. Sometimes it will come up short. Trying and failing is not weakness, not pettiness, not revenge: it is the necessary work of reestablishing the rule of law over a mostly- (but not yet completely-) failed protoauthoritarian regime.

I do remain a bit of a cynic about impeachment in general. Impeachments “are, always have been, and ever shall be political”. I came of political age during the Clinton impeachment, which taught me, at least, “that absolutely nobody of any consequence will care”4. Make no mistake, hauling Trump’s criminal minions before Congress to answer for their crimes against America and Americans will make great content. But it’s 2026 now. That content will change minds even if it doesn’t lead to convictions. It will establish a factual record for future prosecutions. Most importantly it will establish a Democratic Congress’ unwavering commitment to the rule of law.

the list is long. that is the point.

The list of crimes committed by every elected and appointed (legally or otherwise) Trump official is dauntingly long. Cataloging and investigating them all will be hard work. But that hard work is why we sent so many Democrats to the House, and it all needs to be done.

Personally, I’d have three priorities here:

First: justice for Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the other victims of state-sanctioned murders by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. There is a reason their memorials are plastered with I Voted stickers. The agents who pulled the triggers murdered their victims and should be tried for it. The officials who created the conditions in which those murders occurred recklessly endangered the lives of innocent Americans, and should be tried for it. The organizations employing the men who committed these murders are structurally organized around that violence, and their penalty should be complete dismantlement. Representative, you and I already agree on abolishing ICE; I’d go further and revert DHS altogether. Built around an office designed in part as a Dubya-era sinecure for Pennsylvania’s then-governor, Tom Ridge, it has been an utter failure of an agency for the past quarter century, and has done a demonstrably worse job in its mission than the predecessor agencies that consolidated into it. And now that mistake has a body count, first and foremost in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Break it up. Send Customs and the Secret Service back to Treasury, the Coast Guard back to Transportation, immigration back to Justice, FEMA back on its own feet, and the word “Homeland” back in the box it came in. I look forward to re-electing you in 2028, so you can make this happen.

Second: reasserting Congress’ power of the purse. Article I, Section 9: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”, which in my line of work we’d call a MUST NOT. I’d start with paying the troops out of research and development accounts during the fall 2025 shutdown, since nobody wants to be against paying soldiers, which makes it the cleanest test of whether the clause still means what it says. Then there’s money that was appropriated and never spent, on which GAO has now found a dozen violations of the Impoundment Control Act; since a D.C. Circuit panel held last year that only GAO can sue under that Act, enforcing it falls to Congress and its own auditors.

Third: basically everything the “Department of Government Efficiency” did. A federal judge found in March 2025 that dismantling USAID was likely unconstitutional and that Elon Musk was likely exercising authority requiring Senate confirmation. The Justice Department conceded in January that DOGE staff at Social Security may have put personal data on a server “not approved for storing SSA data”; according to Nextgov, the agency still doesn’t know the full scope of what was accessed or shared. I’ve worked around security operations long enough to know what that sentence means in an incident report. The courts have mostly stayed out of it; the Supreme Court let DOGE have the data last year, and an appeals court lifted the remaining limits in April. Most of these people were never “civil Officers” in the constitutional sense, so the tools here are subpoenas and contempt rather than impeachment.

That’s three, and it isn’t all of it. Your H.Res. 1119 dies with this Congress on January 3, and Bondi’s firing doesn’t moot it5; please introduce it again in the next one. In my opinion, reestablishing the rule of law means we basically have to impeach and sanction for every single illegal thing, even though that list is daunting. I know Oversight and Judiciary are hiring several dozen lawyers and staff. Y’all are going to need more lawyers.

Failing to bring those responsible for the failed coup of January 6, 2021 to justice was a nearly fatal error. It cannot be repeated in the name of a fantasy of bipartisanship that, honestly, died in Washington with Newt’s Contract6.

Sincerely,

Brian Trammell
Squirrel Hill South, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (for electoral purposes),
from a forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe7

(1): The AP called it less than an hour after the polls closed.

(2): As a born Tennessean, raised to support the Volunteers against the Ole Miss Rebels, it feels strange to be jealous of Mississippi progressivism.

(3): On whom more later.

(4): Both quotes are from 2013, when I proposed a hypothetical impeachment of Barack Obama, over a technically-illegal but economically-essential bond auction during the Tea Party House’s debt ceiling brinksmanship, as “a nice long winter’s entertainment”.

(5): William Belknap resigned as Secretary of War in 1876 to get out from under the House; the House impeached him anyway, and the Senate tried him anyway. He was acquitted, largely on the grounds that he’d resigned, so please consider this a precedent for the attempt.

(6): The Contract with America, 1994. I grant you that your own subpoena carried with Republican votes and that Massie exists, but that is what’s left of bipartisanship: a few Republicans voting with you because they’ve looked at the alternative, not because anyone reconciled with anyone. For the record, we can also date the decline to the time Bill wouldn’t let Newt sit up front on Air Force One.

(7): “If we do this, terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe.” “This” being a police state; that’s me, on September 20, 2001. I got the order of operations wrong.

The research for this letter (the roll calls, the text of H.Res. 1119, who said what to whom and when) was done by Claude (Opus). The opinions are my own, and predate it by at least a quarter century.