On Nov. 6, voters across America delivered President Donald Trump his reckoning and flipped over 30 seats in the House of Representatives to Democratic control. For too long, Republicans have hijacked the systems of checks and balances in our country to shelter Trump from facing consequences for his actions.

We believe that Democrats should view this victory as a mandate from the people and a mandate to utilize subpoena power to bring Republicans to justice. Democrats now control all of the House subcommittees and need to investigate all of Trump’s misdeeds that he has committed to since taking office.

Trump has done all in his power to stymie the investigation into alleged collusion between his Presidential campaign and Russia by the Justice Department by firing Jeff Sessions and installing a Deputy Attorney General who has been openly hostile to the Mueller investigations. Democrats can use the House to launch their own investigations and can even subpoena Mueller if he is dismissed as Special Investigator.

The election also served as a rebuke toward the president who sought to exclude transgender people from Title IX laws and vilified asylum seekers as criminals. Hundreds of women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community were elected in local, state and federal elections. Jared Polis is slated to become Colorado’s first openly gay governor, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as the first Muslim women in Congress and Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland as the first Native American women elected to Congress.

In California, one of the state’s few Republican holdouts, Orange County, seems to have gone Democratic. Democrats are leading or have won in four out of the seven Congressional races in the county. Even in Texas, Beto O’Rourke lost his bid for Senator but democrats gained ten seats in state legislatures and Texas has never looked more blue. Across the nation, Democrats flipped seven governor seats and broke four Republican trifectas while gaining six of their own.

The midterms may not have seen the “blue wave” some expected but the results paint a clear picture: Americans are losing faith in the Republican party.