Democrats Quickly Confront the Limits of Their Power to Stop Trump

House Democrats barely had a chance to celebrate the new majority they won on Tuesday before Donald Trump confronted them with their first test. Hours after warning Democrats of retaliation if they harassed him with congressional investigations, the president ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with a loyalist who had criticized the probe that has placed Trump in legal jeopardy.

And so, a day after voters elected them to serve as a check on the Republican president, Democrats responded swiftly by marshaling the full force of their power: They fired off a few strongly worded letters.

Specifically, Democrats insisted that Republicans hold emergency hearings on Sessions’s firing, and they wrote to the White House demanding that officials there preserve all records having to do with Trump’s decision to replace him on an acting basis with the departed attorney