How one new N.J. House Democrat wants to fight back against Trump

Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), elected in a special election last year to a Newark-based district, didn’t draw too much attention outside of New Jersey in her first few months in Congress. That changed last week.

At a protest outside the U.S. Treasury Department on February 4, McIver delivered a diatribe against Elon Musk’s access to sensitive Treasury information that ended with a memorable exclamation: “Goddammit, shut down the Senate! We are at war!” McIver’s words quickly drew attention and condemnation in conservative circles, with writeups in the New York Post and Breitbart; even Donald Trump’s White House promoted the video of McIver, calling it a “despicable call to violence” from a “radical lawmaker.”

Speaking with the New Jersey Globe yesterday, McIver said that she “absolutely” stands by her statement – not in calling for a literal war with weapons, which she said is how Republicans have mischaracterized her remarks, but as a war for the future of the country and for the people she represents.

“​​Whenever you can disregard the Constitution, disregard Congress, disregard the Senate, and basically do whatever you want to do at the stroke of the pen – and doing some things that are not even at the stroke of a pen – that’s a problem,” McIver said. “That’s war on people. That’s war on constituents that I represent.”

In the week since the Treasury Department protest, McIver said that she and her office have been inundated with criticism and vitriol, much of it unrelated to the content of what she was actually saying.

“I have literally been getting called everything online except a child of God – me being overweight, me being Black and ghetto, you name it,” she said. “It’s honestly pretty nasty and disgusting. And I can see exactly what kind of character many of the Trump followers have… Nothing about my leadership, nothing about policy, nothing about my experiences, just about my appearance and where I come from.”

McIver’s moment in the spotlight comes in the midst of larger debates within the Democratic Party on how best to combat Trump’s and Musk’s far-reaching orders, orders that have started to dismantle many government agencies and programs.

Democrats have little formal power in Washington – the presidency and both houses of Congress are controlled by the GOP, and conservatives have a clear majority on the Supreme Court – and McIver argued that activists calling for Democrats to do more would do well to remember that. But Democratic senators and House members can still raise hell through protesting, like McIver did at the Treasury Department last week, and through using their limited power in Washington to gum up the works of Congress.

That’s what many Democrats, among them McIver, are saying should be done when Congress tries to pass government funding legislation before a looming shutdown deadline in March. Republicans will struggle to keep the government open without Democratic help, and McIver said that she would be willing to withhold her vote in protest of the Trump administration’s actions; that’s something that Senator Andy Kim hinted at over the weekend, too.

Kim had his own semi-viral moment last week, when he visited the offices of the United States Agency for International Development – his former employer, and one of the first agencies targeted by Trump and Musk in their cost-cutting purge – and was denied a meeting with the agency’s acting director. Kim told the Globe last week that while he might like to work together with Republicans, there are lines he’s not willing to cross.

“For me, there is a bright line when it comes to the Constitution,” he said. “The American people, they’re like, ‘Are you going to find bipartisanship? Do you think Trump has a mandate?’ None of that matters when it comes to the Constitution. No mandate from the people can give Trump the power to be able to override our Constitution.”

And some New Jersey Democrats have other levers of power beyond just their votes on the House or Senate floor that they can use. As the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) has begun sending letters and launching investigations into Trump’s attempted spending freezes; Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), meanwhile, sits on the Appropriations and Budget Committees, which will play key roles in both the upcoming government funding fight and in any reconciliation legislation Congress tries to pass.

New Jersey’s three-member Republican delegation, on the other hand, has largely stayed on the sidelines during Trump’s early weeks in office, and it’s less clear whether they have any worries about what the Trump administration is doing to agencies like USAID.

Late last week, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) released a statement praising Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for identifying waste, particularly with regards to foreign aid programs, but also cautioned against any potential cuts to core programs like Social Security or Medicaid – an unusually cautious message from the conservative congressman. Asked whether that indicated any trepidation about the Trump administration’s efforts, Van Drew said no, but he wanted to make sure Republicans go about cost-cutting in the right way.

“When it comes to things like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security – and others – we do need to use a scalpel and not a hatchet,” he said. “I’ve spoken to the president about this, and he agrees. He doesn’t want to hurt people, working people… Do it, do it swiftly, do it laser-like.”

Part of the problem for any member of Congress, of either party, is that the strategy from the Trump administration has largely bypassed Capitol Hill entirely; orders to take apart government agencies and programs have been coming directly from the White House and DOGE, and the fight to stop them has been taking place in the courts rather than in the Capitol.

That limits the ability of any one member, particularly a freshman in the minority party like McIver, to have a say. The most that she can do for now, McIver said, is fight back as loudly as possible and make sure no one is able to look away from what’s happening.

“I think the Trump administration has set it up like this to overwhelm the system with all of this chaos so that folks can miss some things or get burnt out, or detach fully,” she said. “But all of us are working together to strategize around all of this.”