I think we've got a matter of months to figure out whether our Democratic Republic is going to hold. This is not a drill. The sideboards are being tested in ways we've never seen. And I hope that some combination of the courts and our Democratic minority in Congress, especially if we can leverage a few Republicans to work with us, can keep this thing together.

Well, whether we can keep this thing together is exactly what we talk about in our weekly installment of If You Can Keep It, where we ask the questions that really matter to you about the state of our democracy. And today we ask, where is

the political resistance? What power does Congress have at this moment to fight Trump? I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwillick. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story.

We get into all that and more after the break.

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us here in studio is Liz Goodwin. She reports on Congress for The Washington Post. Liz, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Also with us is Joel Payne, Democratic Strategist and Chief Communications Officer for MoveOn. That's a progressive public policy advocacy group. Joel, it's great to have you. Good

to be with you. And

on the line is Sarah Longwell, political strategist, host of the Focus Group podcast and publisher of The Bulwark. She's also former executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump. Sarah, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Well, Liz, let's start with what we have seen from Congress so far. What specific pushback have we seen from both Democrats and Republicans? Yeah,

I would say Democrats sort of woke up about maybe a week and a half ago. They started, especially in the Senate, slowing down as much as they could all of Trump's nominations or most of Trump's nominations for the cabinet. Republicans, on the other hand, when there is a little bit of discomfort with what's happening, it is almost always expressed privately to the White House. So the memo that froze spending from the OMB, that really did disturb a lot of Republicans, especially in the Senate. They were worried about programs they care about being cut. But publicly, they were sort of walking the plank for the administration saying, is fine, you know, wheels on wheels, that can go away. You know, they really defended it. But then privately, there was a lot of pushback and that memo did get rescinded. So we're not really seeing a moment yet where there's Republicans who are willing to say, I don't like this out loud. I think they feel like Trump is very popular. He has a mandate to do what he wants to do right now. So even when things are very unconventional or they're pretty uncomfortable with it, they have not been voicing that.