View / Can Democrats afford to take on Big Tech? Or to leave it alone?

Glover’s plea comes as Democrats across a handful of House committees are deciding how to use their subpoenas and hearings if they retake the majority. The potential target list is expansive, including obscure felons, blue-chip companies, the Trump family, and the Cabinet. A handful of politically charged mergers, as my colleague Nicholas Wu has reported, are also in their sights.

And for now, they’re still working out their priorities.

“We can’t do everything,” Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told me of his committee and others. “We’re narrowing down right now what our lanes are going to be.”

Garcia said Democrats want to probe Trump family corruption, as well as the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, immigration enforcement, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s work.

“The big lane for us is going to be this corporate corruption and going after folks that are ripping off the public,” Garcia said.

The Oversight Democrats, whose website opens with a picture of Trump and Epstein, have very limited power in the minority. They have sent a series of stern letters to government officials and CEOs who aren’t obliged to respond. None of their public letters have targeted Big Tech’s payments to Trump causes.

Trump and his family deny all wrongdoing, and cast the unprecedented monetization of the presidency as an open extension of their thriving family business.

When it comes to those donations, “the American public has a right to know what they were expecting in return,” Garcia said.

Glover’s argument to keep away from Big Tech is indicative of the reality in Washington that the US political system is buckling in the face of ascendant corporate and tech power. Early MAGA gestures toward reining in corporations quickly gave way quickly to dealmaking, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are immune to a sense that the balance has shifted.

Long before Trump entered the picture in DC, there has been the burning question of how to understand corporate money in Washington: Is it like bribery, a simple transaction for a concrete outcome? Or is it something a little closer to extortion, a payment to be left alone? For most of Big Tech, the Trump administration has looked a bit more like the latter.

Still, tech CEOs may want to keep their calendars free next spring. There’s a perception, at least in Washington. that beating up on Big Tech is good politics. (The victory of the pro-data-center candidate for governor of Wisconsin, as my colleague Dave Weigel noted, suggests it may not be quite that simple.) And that iconic photograph of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration more or less guarantees Democrats will call them to testify in 2027.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., another Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said big American companies will be a top focus next year.

“It is sad that so many companies bent the knee to a corrupt president, and did not stand up to an authoritarian regime. You would have thought that American companies would have had more spine,” Lieu told me.

I asked if he thought they should pay a price for that.

“One thousand percent,” he responded. “Now, whether that’s a prosecution, I don’t know. That would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But definitely, congressional hearings can take place where they’re going to have to answer publicly in front of the American people.”