It is Sunday, February 1st, I'm Ali Valshi.

The Republican majority in the House is shrinking.

Texas Democrat Christian Menafee won a special election last night to fill a vacancy

in the Houston-based 18th congressional district.

When he's sworn in, Republicans will have just a four-seat majority

heading into a midterm election season that will find the GOP reckoning with a slew of deeply

unpopular policies from the Trump administration. The seat sat vacant for a year as Texas

Governor Greg Abbott took a record amount of time to call for an election in the Deep Blue

District. In that year,

Congress failed to serve as a check to Trump, and the Congressman elect has made his intentions

for office clear, telling his supporters last night that he plans to go to Washington to work as

hard as he can to oppose Trump's agenda and investigate what he called Trump's crimes.

Elsewhere in Texas, a state Senate special election in Fort Worth last night

saw a stunning victory by the Democrat, Taylor Remet. The veteran and labor leader flipped a Republican-held

state Senate seat in a district that Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024, and it wasn't even

close. With nearly all votes counted, the Associated Press

had remit leading by more than 14 points. The president's policies from trade wars and tariffs

to expired health insurance subsidies to foreign misadventures to the deployment of armed

federal agents to American cities as part of his brutal ice crackdown are deeply unpopular.

And come November, every voter who's unhappy with the direction Donald Trump is taking the country

in will be able to cast a ballot against his party and his agenda.

But November's a long way away when you're living inside a news cycle that feels repetitive,

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