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Democrats Can't Outvote Trump's Veto Pen. They Can Build the Next Pro-Worker Era.

The midterm wave won't get the PRO Act signed while Trump holds the White House. It can write the blueprint for 2029, and decide who runs the agencies workers depend on.

Democrats Can't Outvote Trump's Veto Pen. They Can Build the Next Pro-Worker Era.
Official portrait of Donald Trump, 2025. Photo by Daniel Torok, public domain, via The White House.

Working people just fired a warning shot at Washington.

As of Wednesday evening, Democrats had locked up at least 237 seats in the next House and 54 in the Senate, with Mississippi and Alaska still counting, according to Law360. Compare that to today's Congress, where Republicans hold the House 218-214 and the Senate 53-47. Democrats won battlegrounds in Texas, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina. Outside Maine, those are states Republicans treated as furniture.

Enjoy it. Then get ready for the veto.

The math nobody wants to say out loud

Overriding a presidential veto takes two-thirds of both chambers: 290 House members and 67 senators. Even the best-case Democratic Senate of 56 seats falls short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, let alone 67. So every serious pro-worker bill this Congress passes will land on Trump's desk, and Trump will kill it.

Trump's signature law, the 2025 tax-and-spending package he called the "One Big Beautiful Bill," was a transfer of wealth up the ladder. The Congressional Budget Office found the House-passed version would cost the poorest tenth of households about $1,600 a year, mostly through Medicaid and food stamp cuts, while the richest tenth would gain about $12,000 a year, mostly through tax cuts. Those tax cuts are why the debt is rising faster, services are being cancelled, and American science is being gutted.

Trump works for himself and the top 1% of the billionaire class. But there is reason to keep the pressure up. Look at what happened the last time Democrats had the keys to the government.

Remember what pro-worker government delivers

In two years with a Democratic trifecta, and in the two years after, the Biden administration delivered real protections that working families still use today.

The PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act. Passed in December 2022, it extended the right to break time and a private, non-bathroom space to pump breast milk to roughly 9 million more workers who'd been left out of the 2010 law. That gap swallowed teachers, nurses and farmworkers. The fix finally gave them remedies when employers broke the rules.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Passed the same month with bipartisan support and in effect since June 27, 2023, the PWFA requires employers with 15 or more employees to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions. Need for it? In the law's first 11 months, the EEOC received 1,869 charges from workers saying their employers refused or delayed accommodations. The most common requests weren't exotic. Workers asked for extra water breaks, a place to pump and permission to come in late because of morning sickness. Bosses said no often enough to fill nearly 2,000 federal complaints in under a year.

The ban on noncompetes. Under Chair Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission voted in April 2024 to ban most noncompete agreements, the contracts that trap an estimated 30 million workers, about 1 in 5, in jobs they can't leave without getting sued. The FTC projected the ban would raise the average worker's earnings by $524 a year, spark 8,500 new businesses annually and cut health care costs by up to $194 billion over a decade.

Then a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, Ada Brown, struck the rule down in August 2024. In September 2025, Trump's FTC under Chair Andrew Ferguson voted to drop the appeal and let the ban die. Thirty million workers went right back to the leash. (California, North Dakota and Oklahoma already refuse to enforce most noncompetes, which tells you the sky doesn't fall when workers are free to quit.)

Biden also became the first sitting president to join a picket line, standing with striking UAW workers in 2023. You can argue about plenty from those four years. You can't argue that Washington was on the boss's side.

Meet the woman guarding your civil rights at work

If you want to know what's at stake in 2028, look at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency workers turn to when they're fired for being pregnant, harassed, or passed over because of their race, age or disability.

Trump put Andrea Lucas in charge of it. Lucas, a former labor and employment lawyer at a big international law firm, joined the commission during Trump's first term. Trump made her acting chair on day one of his second term, then fired two Democratic commissioners in a move with no precedent, clearing the way for a Republican majority. The Senate confirmed her along party lines in July 2025 for a term that runs to July 2030, and Trump named her permanent chair that November.

Her record on pregnant workers alone should alarm you. Lucas voted against the EEOC's rule implementing the PWFA and has said she wants to reconsider it. She has objected not just to its coverage of abortion, but to its protections for fertility treatment, menstruation and menopause. More than 70 organizations urged the Senate not to confirm her. The National Women's Law Center called her a Trump loyalist handpicked to weaponize the agency.

That's who's reading your discrimination charge right now.

Lucas's seat lasts until 2030, but the president picks the chair and sets the agency's direction. A Democratic president in January 2029 can change the EEOC's leadership on day one. Four more years of Trump-style leadership would only make it worse.

What Democrats can do in the meantime

A veto-proof majority isn't the only kind of power. Democrats now have three tools, and they should use all of them.

Pass the bills anyway. Labor advocates told Law360 the plan is to move the PRO Act and push for a minimum wage hike knowing Trump won't sign them, with the goal of getting them signed in 2029. Good. Make every Republican vote on the record. Make Trump veto a union bill in front of the country. Receipts win elections.

Use the power of the purse. Democrats will hold the gavels on the appropriations committees that write the government's funding bills. That means fighting for real money for the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor and the EEOC's investigators, the people who actually answer the phone when your boss steals your wages.

Use subpoena power. Committees in both chambers can now demand records and put Trump officials under oath. The firing of Democratic commissioners, the FTC walking away from 30 million workers and the gutting of pregnancy protections all deserve sworn testimony.

And they're building a bench. The incoming class includes labor champions like Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, himself a Communications Workers of America member, Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed, Maine's Troy Jackson and Ohio's Sherrod Brown, back in the Senate after losing in 2024.

Keep voting. Keep showing up.

Tuesday proved the system still answers when enough of us show up. It also proved that one election isn't enough. The PUMP Act, the PWFA and the noncompete ban didn't come from a single good night. They came from years of organizing that finally met a government willing to act.

Trump can veto bills. He can't veto turnout. The next two years are the blueprint. 2028 is the build.

Keep voting. Keep showing up. Bring three coworkers next time.

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