Civil Friendship: What the Church Asks of a Divided Washington After Democrats Win Congress

Democrats took the Senate late Tuesday and the House early Wednesday, flipping Senate seats in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina that no Democrat had won in decades. By midnight, the President was talking about his veto pen, the outgoing Speaker was talking about 2028, and the incoming majority had a list of investigations ready. Most of the coverage is about who won and by how much. While that makes for a great story, it is not what matters in this moment. What matters in this moment is the question that the Church asks: what happens next. How will the two parties who will share power for two years treat each other while they work for the American people who put them into office?

The News Story

Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections, ending the unified Republican government President Donald Trump has worked with since January 2025. The Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats late Tuesday night, after Democrat Josh Turek defeated Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa. The AP called the House for Democrats early Wednesday morning.¹

Republicans entered Election Day holding 53 Senate seats to 47 for Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them. Democrats needed a net gain of 4. They flipped at least 7 Republican-held seats, several in states that have not elected a Democratic senator in decades. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton, breaking a Republican winning streak in Texas statewide races that reached back to the 1990s. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton unseated Sen. Roger Marshall; the German news agency dpa reported that the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Kansas won in 1932. In South Carolina, pediatrician Annie Andrews defeated Republican Darline Graham Nordone, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July. Sherrod Brown beat Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio, and Roy Cooper won an open seat in North Carolina.²

In Maine, five-term Sen. Susan Collins lost to Democrat Troy Jackson, a former state senator who became the party’s nominee in July. Collins conceded by phone Tuesday evening, according to MS NOW and CNN, and the AP later called the race. After that call, Forbes reported, Democrats had won 53 Senate contests and Republicans 41, with races including Michigan and Alaska still uncalled.³

Democrats also held their own competitive seats. Sen. Jon Ossoff won reelection in Georgia over Republican Rep. Mike Collins, and Chris Pappas defeated former Sen. John Sununu in New Hampshire for the seat of retiring Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Republicans kept Florida, where Ashley Moody won a special election to finish Marco Rubio’s term, and Wyoming, where Harriet Hageman won the seat of retiring Sen. Cynthia Lummis.⁴

In the House, Republicans held 218 seats and Democrats 214 before the vote, with one independent and two vacancies. Republican Reps. Tom Kean of New Jersey and Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry and Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania lost reelection, according to the AP, and Democrats won open seats in North Carolina and Kentucky. NBC News projected that Democrats could finish with as many as 244 seats, though several competitive races were still being counted Wednesday. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York is expected to be elected speaker when the new Congress convenes on January 3, 2027, which would make him the first Black speaker. CBS News reported that his priorities include reversing Medicaid cuts in the 2025 budget law, extending expired Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, ending the war with Iran and rolling back tariffs. House Democrats also plan investigations once they gain subpoena power in January.⁵

Of the 36 governor’s races, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds won in Florida over former Rep. David Jolly, and Democratic Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker of Illinois won reelection.⁶

Trump, who was not on the ballot, wrote on Truth Social that if he had been, Republicans “would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” In a CBS News interview late Tuesday, he said, “My message is congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country,” and added that otherwise “I’d just veto everything.” Speaker Mike Johnson told supporters he was disappointed. “Come 2028, we will take back the House and we will finish this job,” he said.⁷

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

“I’d Just Veto Everything”

Late Tuesday, with the Senate already gone and the House about to follow, President Trump gave CBS News his message for the winners. “My message is congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.” In the next breath he added that they would want to work with him, because “otherwise, I’d just veto everything, and they’re not gonna want that.” Earlier in the day he had called the veto “the ultimate power” and predicted that after a couple of months of it, the other side would come asking for a deal.⁸ Speaker Mike Johnson told his supporters, “Come 2028, we will take back the House and we will finish this job.”⁹ And House Democrats had their own list ready before a single vote was counted: investigations into the President’s family business, his pardons and immigration enforcement, to begin the day they get subpoena power in January. Asked about a third impeachment, Hakeem Jeffries said, “we haven’t ruled anything out.”¹⁰

I’ve heard some version of that election night recap after every midterm election that I can remember. The sitting president promises to work with the incoming party while also threatening vetoes; a defeated Speaker promises a comeback; a new majority sharpens its oversight pen. Each of those can be perfectly legitimate. The veto is in the Constitution, and so is the power of Congress to investigate. Still, for the next two years one party will hold the White House and the other will hold both houses of Congress, and almost nothing the country needs can happen without both. So the question this morning reaches past the vote count. How are the winners and the losers going to live together until 2028? The Church has a name for what she hopes they find. She calls it civil friendship.

More Than a List of Rights

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church makes a claim about political life that sounds almost quaint in a week like this one. “The profound meaning of civil and political life does not arise immediately from the list of personal rights and duties. Life in society takes on all its significance when it is based on civil friendship and on fraternity.” Then the Compendium draws an important distinction. Rights belong to the sphere of “safeguarded interests, external respect, the protection of material goods and their distribution according to established rules.” Friendship belongs to “selflessness, detachment from material goods, giving freely and inner acceptance of the needs of others.”¹¹

Hold that up against Tuesday night. Almost every sentence spoken was in the first vocabulary: the power to veto, the power to subpoena, the resolve to take the House back. The Church has no quarrel with that vocabulary. Rules and rights protect the weak, and a republic needs them. A government that runs on nothing else, though, turns into a standoff between neighbors guarding their property lines, and the Compendium admits, with real candor, that “in large part, this principle has not been put into practice in the concrete circumstances of modern political society.”¹²

Saint Thomas Aquinas would have found none of this quaint. He taught that the “principal intention of human law” is friendship “between man and man,” just as the chief intention of God’s law “is to establish man in friendship with God.”¹³ A few pages earlier he put it in a single line: “every law aims at establishing friendship, either between man and man, or between man and God.”¹⁴ For Thomas, the statutes, the budgets and the whole machinery of government are means. The end they serve is a people able to live together in peace. A Congress that sends legislation to a White House that immediately vetoes it on arrival is a government that has lost track of what the machinery is for. It is a government no longer working to ensure a people that can live together in peace.

Friendship Without Agreement

Civil friendship asks for something harder than agreement, and nothing in it asks the opposition to go soft. The Catechism ties it directly to solidarity: “The principle of solidarity, also articulated in terms of ‘friendship’ or ‘social charity,’ is a direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood.” And it describes what solidarity looks like in public life: “the effort for a more just social order where tensions are better able to be reduced and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation.”¹⁵ Notice that the Catechism assumes the conflicts. That is part of human nature. People of good will may disagree on the best path forward on a given issue. This important question to ask is: how does that disagreement or conflict get settled in civil society?

Pope Francis described the alternative in Fratelli Tutti, and it reads like an essay written about the last two years. “Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools,” he wrote, and in that climate “debate degenerates into a permanent state of disagreement and confrontation.”¹⁶ Pope Francis’s remedy was a habit of mind. Authentic social dialogue, he wrote, “involves the ability to respect the other’s point of view and to admit that it may include legitimate convictions and concerns.” In that spirit, “it becomes possible to be frank and open about our beliefs, while continuing to discuss, to seek points of contact, and above all, to work and struggle together.”¹⁷

Work and struggle together. I like that phrase because it doesn’t pretend. Jeffries and the President will disagree about tariffs, about Medicaid, about the war with Iran. They are supposed to. Civil friendship asks them to argue as fellow citizens who will still share a country when the argument is over. They need to see each other first as sons of the Father, as citizens of America, and not as political enemies.

Holding Power to Account, Peacefully

In fairness, Tuesday also showed the better side of American politics, and it deserves credit. The Compendium, quoting Pope St. John Paul II, says the Church values democracy because it “guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.”¹⁸ That is exactly what happened. Sen. Susan Collins, a five-term senator, picked up the phone Tuesday evening and conceded to Troy Jackson.¹⁹ The President, for all his talk of vetoes, opened by congratulating the people who beat his party. Those are small acts, but they are the stuff civil friendship is made of.

The same paragraph cuts both ways for the new majority. Holding power accountable is part of what voters just asked for, and congressional oversight is one of the ordinary ways a republic does it. Francis named the counterfeit: “a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism,” in which “one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion.”²⁰ Investigations that follow the evidence serve the common good. Investigations run to fill a campaign calendar serve a party, and the voters will be able to tell the difference.

What Political Charity Asks

Francis called politics “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good.”²¹ He was specific about who should move first. “Government leaders should be the first to make the sacrifices that foster encounter and to seek convergence on at least some issues. They should be ready to listen to other points of view and to make room for everyone.”²²

Convergence on at least some issues is possible, and it should be the expectation of the government. It is a modest standard, and it isn’t out of reach. The President told the New York Times, “We’ll work with the Democrats.”²³ CBS News reports that the priorities Jeffries has named center on affordability.²⁴ The voters who sent them back to Washington were worried about the same things: in Ohio, an early voter poll reported by ABC News found about 6 in 10 very concerned about the cost of gas, groceries, utilities and health care.²⁵ A family paying those bills doesn’t care which party proposes the legislation that makes Thanksgiving dinner more affordable. The Compendium says political parties “are called to interpret the aspirations of civil society, orienting them towards the common good.”²⁶ Both parties heard the same aspiration on Tuesday.

What I’d Watch

Watch the first real bill that reaches the President’s desk after January 3, and whether it was written with votes from both parties or written to draw a veto. Watch whether the House investigations name their evidence before they name their targets. Watch Michigan and Alaska, still uncounted. And watch the tone of the next week, because the habits a new Congress forms in its first month tend to last.

And, as always, pray. Pray for President Trump, for Hakeem Jeffries, for Mike Johnson, and for every senator and representative elected on Tuesday, that they see their opponents as sons and daughters of God and fellow citizens first. Pray for Sen. Collins as she leaves the seat she held for five terms, and for Troy Jackson as he takes it. Pray for the families whose grocery and medical bills drove this election. And pray for one another, especially across our own kitchen tables in a few weeks’ time. St. Paul asked that prayers be made “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way” (1 Timothy 2:1-2).

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This story turns on civil friendship: political life finds its full meaning when rivals who disagree still work together for the common good.

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Notes

1. ↑ “Democrats Take Control of the Senate After Winning Key Midterm Races,” Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, November 3, 2026, pbs.org; Sara Dorn, “Midterm Election Results (Live Updates): Democrats Sweep House and Senate in Stunning Rout,” Forbes, November 4, 2026, forbes.com; “Democratic Party Gains US House Majority in 2026 Midterm Elections,” Al Jazeera, November 4, 2026, aljazeera.com.
2. ↑ Associated Press, “Democrats Take Control of the Senate”; “Trump’s Republicans Lose Control of Both US House and Senate,” dpa via Yahoo News, November 4, 2026, yahoo.com; Edith Olmsted, “Good Riddance to Susan Collins,” The New Republic, November 4, 2026, newrepublic.com.
3. ↑ Olmsted, “Good Riddance to Susan Collins”; Dorn, “Midterm Election Results.”
4. ↑ Associated Press, “Democrats Take Control of the Senate.”
5. ↑ “Democrats Retake House Majority After 4 Years,” CBS News, November 3, 2026, cbsnews.com; Associated Press, “Democrats Take Control of the Senate”; Gerren Keith Gaynor, “Hakeem Jeffries Poised to Become First Black House Speaker After Democrats Win Majority,” TheGrio via Yahoo News, November 4, 2026, yahoo.com; Al Jazeera, “Democratic Party Gains US House Majority.”
6. ↑ Dorn, “Midterm Election Results.”
7. ↑ dpa, “Trump’s Republicans Lose Control”; “Trump Congratulates Democrats After Republicans Lose the Midterms,” Fox News, November 4, 2026, foxnews.com.
8. ↑ Fox News, “Trump Congratulates Democrats.”
9. ↑ dpa, “Trump’s Republicans Lose Control.”
10. ↑ CBS News, “Democrats Retake House Majority.”
11. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 390, vatican.va.
12. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 390.
13. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 99, a. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
14. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 99, a. 1, ad 2.
15. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 1939-1940, vatican.va.
16. ↑ Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, October 3, 2020), no. 15, vatican.va.
17. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 203.
18. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 406.
19. ↑ Olmsted, “Good Riddance to Susan Collins.”
20. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 15.
21. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 180.
22. ↑ Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, no. 190.
23. ↑ dpa, “Trump’s Republicans Lose Control.”
24. ↑ CBS News, “Democrats Retake House Majority.”
25. ↑ “Election 2026 Live Results: Dems Take Back Congress, Troy Jackson Unseats Sen. Susan Collins in Maine,” ABC News, November 3, 2026, abcnews.com.
26. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 413.

Books Cited

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• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)