Austin’s Battle-Scarred Congressman Outlines Strategy to Contain Trump and Musk
Where is the resistance? Here.
By Maggie Quinlan, Fri., Feb. 21, 2025
Few people on Earth have more experience in the United States House of Representatives than Lloyd Doggett.
For three decades, the former Texas Supreme Court justice has represented the shifting gerrymandered districts Austin has belonged to. In a chamber 435 strong, Doggett has more congressional experience than about 95% of his fellow House members.
He wants to project hope. He says he still has some. But he also says he’s afraid.
In November, Doggett was describing the incoming administration as the most dangerous threat to our democracy in his lifetime. “I believe that,” he says this week.
It seems his alarm has been ratcheting up since, and if there’s a ceiling, he hasn’t reached it yet. This weekend, Doggett watched a clip of Elon Musk that turned the pressure up yet again. In it, the richest man in the world wore a black T-shirt with “TECH SUPPORT” across his chest. Projected massively on screens via video call, he addressed the World Government Summit in Dubai: “We do need to delete entire agencies,” Musk said. “If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
The next day, Trump invoked Napoleon in a post on X: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
Doggett says he feels his constituents’ fear and anger. Some of them are writing to him asking for impossible feats: Why won’t Congress just call in the military, send them to bar the doors of these federal agencies that Elon Musk has muscled into?
Congress does not have the power to unilaterally deploy the military. It does have the power of the purse. The elected body’s authority to direct government spending is not something ephemeral, Doggett says. It is not just a cultural norm or an unconscious habit. It’s in Article I of the Constitution.
With an unelected centibillionaire assuming Congress’ spending authority, Doggett says the constitutional crisis has already begun.
But what can a Democratic lawmaker from Central Texas do? His party’s minority in the House and Senate is one thing, but even if Republicans and Democrats voted together to rein in the executive branch, Trump’s administration may not comply.
Doggett says a Democratic Party game plan, which is still taking shape, takes Trump’s defiance into account.
“It’s certainly not a panacea,” Doggett says. “I still have some hope that we can be successful in these areas and contain the damage. We can’t prevent all of it, and some good people are going to be hurt in the process. But I think that if we do pull together, that we can have enough of a pushback to contain this.”
Doggett is part of a working group of Democrats, formed on February 10, which is identifying lesser-known congressional tools to hold the administration to account. They are led in part by Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who co-chairs the new Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group.
“That merger of the billionaire tech oligarchs with extremist politics is going to give us a right-wing corporate state,” Raskin told Politico this week. “And that’s what we have to defeat and overcome. And we’re going to do it. And we’ve got the means to do it. And that’s our historic assignment.”
Raskin says the group is already winning. They’re coordinating with lawyers and legal groups, and together their challenges to Trump’s executive orders have resulted in at least 14 temporary restraining orders so far.
Doggett says even when they don’t win, litigating creates a record. That record, he says, could fuel a movement. Public sentiment may matter more in the months ahead. When he talks about what it will take to prevent a full-fledged authoritarian takeover, he says: “revulsion of the American people.”
He paints the picture of Democrats’ strategy in three broad strokes.
“We basically litigate as much as possible, then try to legislate, and the third thing is we motivate,” Doggett told the Chronicle. “What will begin to change this is if he meets significant public resistance.”
Unsuppressed
Outside of his work on the new task force, Doggett has already deployed one rare congressional tool.
After news broke that Elon Musk’s DOGE team gained access to millions of Americans’ most sensitive information at the Treasury Department, Doggett introduced a Resolution of Inquiry into DOGE and Elon Musk’s takeover of the Treasury’s payment systems. All Ways and Means Committee Democrats have put their weight behind this uncommon oversight measure.
The resolution calls for the Trump administration and the secretary of the Treasury to provide the House with documentation of Musk’s access to the Treasury’s payment systems and confidential taxpayer information. Per the resolution, that documentation should include everything: audio recordings, memorandums, screenshots, and more.
Doggett wants to bring the resolution to the floor for a full vote of the House. “The goal is to put Republicans on record as to whether they want to suppress any information about this or not.”
But if Republicans support the resolution, would Trump’s administration actually have to respond? Doggett says there isn’t a penalty mechanism to enforce the resolution.
“Under normal circumstances, which we’re not, you’d expect that if a request is made by the full House for this information, that there would be a meaningful response from the administration,” Doggett says. “This is all we’ve got. We can try and bring him to court. We can try every legislative maneuver we have in the House, because the margin is so close.”
With a budget battle forthcoming, and Republicans looking to cut dramatically in the budget, Doggett says next, Democrats will be asking the public whether they’re getting the economic benefit they wanted from a Trump presidency.
“Our main enemy is arithmetic,” Doggett says. “There are more of them than there are of us.” That’s the tide Democrats must turn.
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