On Tuesday night, House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings injected some fresh blood into the committee that will be leading the investigatory charge against the Trump administration, naming four high-profile and vocal progressives to his team: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ro Khanna. “I want people to be aggressive, especially on that committee. It’s good to have people who aren’t afraid,” Rep. Dan Kildee, one of the Democrats who recommended the four to Cummings, told Politico. “They’re going to be dealing with some pretty important stuff.” That “stuff,” of course, mostly has to do with Donald Trump and the multitude of scandals he has generated since assuming the presidency—all of which were swept under the rug while Republicans controlled the House. Now, with the gavel firmly back in Nancy Pelosi’s hands, Democrats have the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, and a large team to investigate everything from Trump’s finances to Russian collusion.

The appointment of the four, three of whom are freshmen in Congress, suggests an evolving Democratic strategy. As a congressional aide told my colleague Abigail Tracy back in November, party leaders are sensitive to how their multiple investigations of the Trump administration are portrayed by the public. “Democrats need to find that balance where we are being transparent and deliberate and operating in good faith about this stuff, because we don’t want it to be a political sideshow,” the aide said.

At the same time, Democratic leadership is beginning to recognize the benefits of having a bona-fide social-media star in their midst. Ocasio-Cortez, who has generated more headlines than perhaps any other freshman congresswoman in modern history, has also brought unprecedented media attention to progressive causes like the Green New Deal and a proposed 70 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million. Indeed, her social-media presence is so effective and terrifying to Republicans that she recently ran a seminar for her Democratic colleagues on how to use Twitter.

All that extra attention creates drawbacks, too. Tlaib was recently pilloried for calling on Congress to “impeach the motherfucker,” prompting Republicans to call for her censure, while Ocasio-Cortez got into a social-media fight with Donald Trump Jr., and implied that she would subpoena him. While Cummings said he wasn’t concerned—“If I based the choices going on the committee based on what people said, or their reputations or whatever, I probably wouldn’t have a committee,” he told Politico—other Democrats are wary.

Several Democratic colleagues recently groused that the congressional class of 2019 ought to stay in their lane and stop threatening to campaign against the party’s centrists. “She will come to the understanding that it’s a better use of her time fighting the Republican Party than her Democratic colleagues who agree with her on green energy,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York told Politico, shortly after Ocasio-Cortez frustrated the caucus by trying to score a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

For now, Ocasio-Cortez appears to have won that battle—or at least won over Elijah Cummings. Along with Tlaib, Pressley, and Khanna, she’ll have a massive new platform to remake the Trump-era Democratic House in her vocal, millennial image.

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