The Senate will vote on Trump’s nominees once they are formally nominated after he takes office, but senators have already begun meeting with the expected nominees. They may also hold hearings ahead of Trump’s inauguration, to expedite the confirmation process.
Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR5), a freshman member of the House who just lost reelection, is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to replace Acting Secretary Julie Su as Secretary of Labor. The position requires confirmation by the Senate.
Chavez-DeRemer was defeated in November’s general election by Rep.-elect Janelle Bynum. The 47% to 45% margin marked one of the closest House races in the country.
Right when Chavez-DeRemer’s next career move seemed most uncertain, Trump announced he would nominate her for his Cabinet. The selection raised eyebrows for her unusually pro-union stances in Congress. Indeed, it may be Democrats who put her over the majority threshold for confirmation.
PRO Act
For example, she was one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Richard L. Trumka PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, the main pro-union bill from Democrats in the current Congress.
Named for the late head of the AFL-CIO, its major provisions would include:
- Banning employers from interfering with union elections, most prominently done in recent years by Amazon.
- Making it harder for employers to classify employees as “independent contractors” instead of employees, most famously done in recent years by rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft.
- Increasing penalties and fines for violations.
The two other Republican cosponsors are Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA1) and Chris Smith (R-NJ4). it hasn’t been brought up for a vote in the Republican-controlled House.
The House previously passed it under Democratic control in 2021, before she took office. Five Republicans crossed party lines to vote for it then, while one Democrat opposed it. The Senate never voted on the measure, despite Democrats controlling the chamber at the time.
Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act
She was also one of eight House Republicans to cosponsor a somewhat-similar bill focusing just on public sector employees, such as those who work for the government or schools.
It hasn’t been brought up for a vote in the Republican-controlled House, though prior 2019 and 2021 versions didn’t either, despite Democrats controlling the chamber both times.
Lead sponsor
She’s been the lead sponsor of 25 bills during her two years in Congress. Most were on unremarkable subjects, such as her SWAT Act to increase funding for research on the spotted wing drosophila insect pest.
But a few of her bills have a more tangible connection to labor or the workforce. Here are three.
Recover Pride in Service Act
From 1994 until its 2011 repeal, the military policy nicknamed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” banned Armed Forces members from serving while openly gay. Around 13,000 were expelled under a status other than “honorable discharge,” meaning they weren’t eligible for veteran benefits or pensions.
In February, Chavez-DeRemer introduced a bill to proactively upgrade those discharges to “honorable.” It never received a vote in the Republican-led House.
However, the issue became partially moot a few months later. In October, the Defense Department completed its own proactive review and retroactively upgraded more than 800 people to honorable discharges.
Veterans Affairs Opportunity for Women-Owned Small Businesses Act
For three decades, the government has established a goal to award 5% of all contracts to women-owned businesses. Congress enacted that goal in the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, or FASA.
However, the VA has been falling short of that 5% goal. So Chavez-DeRemer introduced a bill to add women-owned small businesses to “Tier 3” of the VA’s hiring priority list, behind only the existing top two tiers: small businesses owned by veterans who were disabled because of their service, then small businesses owned by veterans who aren’t disabled.
Chavez-DeRemer is the only House Republican sponsor, while the other nine are Democrats. It awaits a potential vote in the chamber.
Opioid Crisis Workforce Act
In 2014, Congress enacted the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, a provision of which established National Dislocated Worker Grants. Chavez-DeRemer’s bill would redirect more of those grants to workers in areas suffering from heavy substance abuse, particularly the opioid epidemic.
While the bill didn’t receive a standalone vote, it was incorporated into the 334-page A Stronger Workforce for America Act. The House passed it in April by an overwhelming and bipartisan 378-26. It awaits a potential Senate vote.
What Congress is saying
Democrats could be amenable to this nomination. No less an economic progressive than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently indicated possible openness to voting for Chavez-DeRemer. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and National Education Association President Becky Pringle both expressed cautious optimism as well.
Vice versa, more traditional conservatives have expressed concern about Lori-Chavez. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called her nomination “regrettable,” while Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said of her: “There’s some questions that need to be answered.”
The Senate will vote on Trump’s nominees once they are formally nominated after he takes office, but senators have already begun meeting with the expected nominees. They may also hold hearings ahead of Trump’s inauguration, to expedite the confirmation process.
A break from tradition
Trump’s two Labor Secretaries during his first term, Alex Acosta and Eugene Scalia, adopted more “traditional” business-friendly conservative Republican approaches towards unions. For example, both encouraged states to adopt so-called “right to work” laws.
Indeed, Democrats mostly opposed Acosta by 9-38, while they unanimously opposed Scalia by 0-44. Both nominees were nonetheless approved by the Senate, controlled by Republicans both times.
Chavez-DeRemer signals a different direction, one whom some have speculated could even earn more Democratic votes than Republican ones. Why the change?
Unions, long considered in the Democratic camp, have been moving to the right in recent years, particularly in Rust Belt swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. For example, the Teamsters union – which had long supported Democrats for president including the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 – instead declined to endorse either major candidate in 2024. The group’s leadership didn’t want to run afoul of their members, many of whom supported Trump.
Jesse Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.