What comes next for Democrats after midterm election victory?

Democrats in the United States are riding high after Tuesday night's victory. The party which picked up both the House and the Senate pledging to get down to work as they seek to place guardrails on Donald Trump for the remainder of his presidency. Trump's domestic agenda remains dead in the water unless he can get Democrats on board. For more on this story, we can bring in France 24's foreign affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert. Doug, always great to see you. How are you? The vote count continues in the United States and the numbers may increase for Democrats once we're waiting to hear what happens in Alaska and other places. What will the party do with this newfound power? Yeah. And before we even get to the newfound power, right, the good news here is that Donald Trump, surprisingly or not, because he often flips on a dime, you know, said on Tuesday night already that he is ready to work with the Democrats, you know, whether that is sort of early safe phasing, face saving, seeing, you know, what might be to come. But he did express openness. So that sort of put paid at least for the moment, right, to these fears that there would It would be an outright. Denial of the results, you know, living in this bubble sealed off from the reality of the magnitude of this blue tsunami, as it's rightly been called, I think. The other challenge, before you get to what the Dems can do, is obviously, and you'll keep saying, is the resolve and unity within the Democratic Party itself, right? We know we could talk ad nauseum about the fact that Democrats as a party are divided. It's a big party. It has a diversity of views within it. That's no secret. You have the progressive wing, the moderate wing. Can they work together, especially looking towards the presidency? For now, my hunch is that the one thing they will be united in is working ambitiously and pretty aggressively and with speed, with due speed, in order to undo what they would see as some of the more horrific measures taken by Trump in the past two years. So they'll be taking aim, obviously, at ICE and immigration. They will be taking aim at health care. They'll be trying to restore some of the undone benefits of Medicaid, which is the low-income health care, Medicare as well. They will be taking aim at tariffs. It might not be so simple because they'll probably have more clout and influence to sort of do a course correction on the domestic front where domestic policies are concerned than on. foreign policies where Donald Trump may, for all his lame duck status, still be able to wield a little bit more of a big stick there. But the big thing is the Democrats, the party, the majority party has oversight and investigative powers. And you can bet your bottom dollar they are going to use those investigative powers to the hilt. They are at the heads of committees. They will now be chairing. Powerful committees in the House, the lower chamber of Congress, where they can basically, yeah, take direct aim at the, you know, the Armed Services Committee, the Intelligence Committee, at the policies of the Defense Department, you know, firing on these so-called drug trafficking ships in the Caribbean, allegations that they're actually firing on civilians, a lot of the policies with respect to the Iran war, a lot of policies with respect to ICE, and finally, the corruption and cronyism that isn't just about Trump. But also has the tentacles that wrap around his entire administration and his direct family members. Family, yeah. You can bet that the House Oversight Committee is going to be looking into that. Not because they're into petty revenge. Not because it's tit for tat and it's all game playing and now we're in power so we're going to go after the other guy. No. Because as Chuck Schumer, who's going to be the new majority leader again, has made clear, he sees it as incumbent, as having a responsibility, a moral, political, and ethical responsibility. As the party in power to hold the president to account, not game playing, simply duty. Doug, thank you very much for that, Douglas.