SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Democratic senators gathered in Colorado yesterday, among them, Chris Van Hollen.
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CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: This is about answering the call of the American people, because what I'm very afraid of is that their calls to end political corruption, their calls to end a rigged economic system will require that we organize the Senate in a different way.
SIMON: And that's the Maryland senator on his bid to try to replace New York's Chuck Schumer as the Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate. NPR senior contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: What do you make of the senator's argument here?
ELVING: It has a lot of appeal, especially to younger voters, first-time voters, independents - the people who fueled this extraordinary Democratic surge, especially in the Senate races that Democrats won when nobody thought they were even close. And yes, the voters want an end to corruption and a rigged economy. But when Van Hollen says he wants to organize the Senate in a different way to achieve those ends, does he just mean a new leader, someone other than the longtime leader Chuck Schumer? What else do we know will change? And how do we know it will be better?
Schumer says he has the vote commitments for most of the Senate Democrats already. He needs 29. Some of his allies are saying he'll have 40 votes or more. But Van Hollen still has time to make his case, and in the end, the vote is cast by secret ballot. And I've seen leadership elections in the past where someone claimed to have the votes before they were cast but did not have a majority when the votes were counted.
SIMON: Let me ask about the House. What does it mean that a week after they won a majority, House Democrats couldn't pass a motion to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth because 11 Democrats didn't make it to the chambers to vote, which, of course, is what they're elected to do?
ELVING: There's a lot of anger about this out there, especially among people who wanted the Democrats to do a lot on Day 1. The problem is they won't actually have the majority in the House until January 3, when the new Congress convenes. So Day 1 for the new majority is still seven weeks away.
This week's vote on Hegseth was forced by a rogue Republican but scheduled and managed by the current Republican leadership. They got every other Republican who voted to oppose the impeachment - they are still the majority party. That's what made the difference. But there were no-shows for the vote in both parties. And in the final tally, it appeared that, had all the Democrats gotten there, they could have prevailed. And that, of course, assumes that the current GOP leadership would allow the vote to end that way when they had more Republican votes available, as well.
So how much difference did this vote make? Hegseth will still face investigations and impeachment when the Democrats actually do take over, and then the Senate will need two-thirds to convict and remove him. The Senate is more likely to do that in January with its new Democratic majority than it would have been with its current majority right now.
SIMON: You say Hegseth impeachment will be back on the agenda in January - perhaps also one for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
ELVING: Those two names leap out - Hegseth for Iran, to be sure, but also for his wholesale demotion of generals and admirals and his efforts to instill his notion of warrior culture throughout the armed forces, Kennedy for some recent issues that have come up about his travels, but perhaps mostly because the measles outbreak has brought us fatalities and thousands of new cases, sometimes more than 200 in a week. In the first four years of this decade, we did not see 200 new cases of measles in a whole year.
Now, Trump has stood by both Hegseth and Kennedy in a way he didn't when the pressure was on some other members of his Cabinet, such as Kristi Noem with Homeland Security and Lori Chavez-DeRemer at Labor. So we'll see if he stands by these men in January, as well.
SIMON: And tell us about the mutual finger-pointing of the Trump administration over Nvidia and China and chip sales.
ELVING: Yes. That list of cabinet members under pressure should really start with Howard Lutnick at Commerce. Lutnick has been portrayed by others in the Trump inner circle as being slow to block the sale of advanced Nvidia computer chips to a certain company called Megaspeed, a company identified by U.S. intelligence as a pass-through, a kind of dummy corporation for the Chinese government. Moreover, one of Megaspeed's executives, a woman named Alice Huang, is alleged to be a Chinese spy who has been having an affair with Jensen Huang, who resigned this week as CEO of Nvidia.
No less an insider than Scott Bessent - the Treasury secretary has said Megaspeed should never have had this access but that Lutnick and commerce dragged their feet and let it happen. And, of course, at the end of the trail, there's the extraordinarily close relationship Jensen Huang had with President Trump. So there's lots to probe here when the new Congress gets going in January.
SIMON: Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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