(Oct. 22, 2026 / JNS)
If Democrats take control of the House or Senate, there would likely be fewer probes of Jew-hatred on campus at the House Education and the Workforce Committee or the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, according to experts.
“A Democratic takeover would likely result in a substantial reduction in targeted congressional investigations into antisemitism,” Karen Paikin Barall, chief policy officer of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told JNS.
The Brandeis Center is “concerned that legislation and initiatives specifically designed to combat antisemitism could face organized opposition, particularly when associated with Trump administration policies,” she said.
“Antisemitism enforcement and oversight could increasingly become points of partisan conflict, with efforts to combat antisemitism characterized as extensions of the administration’s political agenda rather than civil rights priorities,” Paikin Barall told JNS. “This political environment could discourage congressional committee staff and federal agency personnel from pursuing investigations or enforcement actions involving antisemitism.”
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that “the House gavel changes everything, and the Senate gavel changes less than people assume.”
House Republicans choose committee leaders via the Steering Committee, a “leadership-weighted body that interviews the candidates and sends a recommendation to the full Republican conference, which ratifies it,” according to Goldfeder.
Republican committee leaders are typically limited to three consecutive terms, which is why Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) relinquished the committee chair to Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) in January 2025, he said.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that “seniority counts, but does not decide committee leadership” when it comes to determining committee leaders for both parties in the House.
Goldfeder told JNS that Foxx, as committee chair, “ran the investigation that defined this period.” Her December 2023 hearing ended Liz Magill’s and Claudine Gay’s University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University presidencies, respectively, he said.
“In February 2024, she issued the first subpoena to a university in the committee’s 157-year history, to Harvard, after what she described as four unsatisfied document requests and a production that was 40% material already in the public domain,” Goldfeder told JNS.
Foxx increased the investigation to other major universities, and in October 2024, her staff released a report finding that school “administrators treated antisemitism as a public relations problem, bargained with encampments and let faculty derail discipline,” he said.
The report found that the universities likely violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Walberg expanded Foxx’s investigation to other universities and to professors and organizations like the National Education Association and American Psychological Association and student groups, according to Goldfeder.
He also marked up bills aimed at “dismantling” the U.S. Department of Education, Goldfeder told JNS.
Paikin Barall of the Brandeis Center told JNS that Foxx championed “greater transparency of foreign funding to universities” through, among other things, the DETERRENT Act, which implements lower reporting thresholds for colleges and universities to disclose sources of foreign funding.
The bill, formally the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act, has stalled in the Senate.
Paikin Barall also cited Walberg’s expansion of the investigations into K-12 schools, including the School District of Philadelphia and the Berkeley Unified School District.
The committee released a report on Wednesday stating that the districts, which have 205,000 students in 350 schools combined, have become infested with antisemitism and “radical activism.”
House Democrats also select committee leaders through a steering committee, and their caucus votes to ratify them, according to Filitti.
He thinks Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the panel’s ranking member, is likely to become chair of the education panel if the Democrats win, since he has served as the Democratic ranking member on the committee since 2015.
Paikin Barall believes that Scott will have to compete with Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) and Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) for the position, she told JNS.
Scott has opposed efforts to incorporate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred into federal enforcement and “prefers a broader civil rights approach and may be less receptive to advocacy focused specifically on the Jewish community without also addressing other communities, including Muslims and LGBT individuals,” Paikin Barall told JNS.
Filitti told JNS that Scott has “shown open hostility” to the committee’s Jew-hatred investigations, and the congressman has stated that “the committee may not be the appropriate venue for campus antisemitism” and criticized the committee for not holding “hearings on racism, Islamophobia or sexism.”
Scott has also opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act and a bill opposing the movement to boycott Israel, Filitti said.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed the House during Foxx’s tenure as chair but stalled in the Senate, requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the IHRA definition of Jew-hatred.
“With Scott as chairman, expect a major setback in Congress’s efforts to enforce the civil rights of Jewish Americans, the hearings on universities and K-12 stop, the majority staff reports stop and the committee becomes weaponized against the Trump administration,” he told JNS.
Goldfeder agreed. Scott has “repeatedly” said he would not continue the committee’s campus Jew-hatred investigations and claimed that the Trump administration was “punishing universities without investigating them,” he said.
Scott wrote a letter to Walberg asking him if he would open an investigation into Jew-hatred in College Republicans chapters and stated that the U.S. Department of Education, not the committee, is the proper venue for such investigations, Goldfeder said.
Bernie Sanders likely to take over in Dem-majority Senate
In the Senate, parties elect committee members by resolution, “but each conference settles its own slate,” according to Goldfeder.
“Republicans have, since 1995, let the Republican members of each committee choose their chair by secret ballot, subject to conference approval, and they limit a senator to six years as chair and a separate six as ranking member,” he told JNS.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, lost the primary in May. If Republicans maintain control of the Senate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would be next in seniority on the committee, but it’s “unclear” if he would give up his current position as chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, according to Paikin Barall.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) has “expressed interest” in becoming the chair, she said.
Paul has opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act over free speech concerns and put forth an amendment that would have “gutted it,” Paikin Barall told JNS. Marshall came around to supporting the bill after Cassidy added an amendment addressing free speech concerns, she said.
“Marshall has demonstrated an interest in addressing campus antisemitism and holding institutions accountable,” she told JNS. “Paul’s strong emphasis on limiting federal authority and protecting speech could present challenges for advancing some of our priorities, including Title VI enforcement and stronger university oversight.”
Filitti told JNS that Cassidy, as chair of the panel, “convened the Senate hearing on campus antisemitism that Bernie Sanders had refused to hold when he had the gavel.”
“He also opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine and brought the Antisemitism Awareness Act to its first Senate markup,” he said.
Goldfeder credited Cassidy with convening the hearing and holding markups on the Antisemitism Awareness Act and the Protecting Students on Campus Act, the latter aimed at making it easier for students to file Title VI complaints.
But the bills didn’t make it out of committee after “Sanders, with Rand Paul supplying the decisive Republican vote, attached four amendments framed as speech protections for anti-Israel protesters” to the Antisemitism Awareness Act in April 2025, Goldfeder said.
“The committee’s two-hour clock ran out before Republicans could get back to the room,” he told JNS. Cassidy hasn’t brought the bills back to a vote since then, he said.
Senate Democrats “go by committee seniority, ratified by the caucus, with no term limits,” Goldfeder said. “The binding constraint on their side is that a senator leads only one major committee at a time.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) left her position as chair of the committee to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2023, which led to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) chairing the Senate education panel.
Paikin Barall told JNS that if the Democrats take the Senate, Sanders would likely be the panel chair due to his seniority status, and Murray, despite her previous experience as chair, “would not automatically regain the position.”
If Sanders becomes the chair, he would “likely shift the committee’s focus toward free speech, academic freedom and protections for campus protesters,” Paikin Barall said.
Filitti told JNS that Sanders is likely to be the chair if the Democrats win. Sanders “failed to hold a single hearing on campus antisemitism in the 15 months he held the gavel of the HELP committee after Oct. 7, despite bipartisan requests that he do so,” Filitti said.
“He led amendments that stalled the Antisemitism Awareness Act, forced Senate votes to block arms sales to Israel and demanded an end to U.S. support for the Israeli government alongside the passage of Medicare for All,” he told JNS.
“We can expect Sanders to close the investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, continue to ignore Jew-hatred on campuses and use HELP to push medicare-for-all” and to go after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. secretary of health and human services, and the agency he leads.
When Murray was the panel chair, she was “reluctant to recognize that anti-Zionism can constitute anti-Semitism,” Paikin Barall told JNS.
Murray has also “generally emphasized broader civil rights protections, including LGBTQ rights and Islamophobia, rather than targeted antisemitism investigations and opposed efforts to incorporate IHRA into federal enforcement,” Paikin Barall said.
The Senate committee under the Democrats would “treat the campus antisemitism file as an academic freedom file, run its oversight at the administration’s funding cuts rather than at the universities and leave the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the DETERRENT Act and the Protecting Students on Campus Act where Cassidy left them, minus the pretense of a pending vote,” Goldfeder told JNS.
“Bill Cassidy leaves the Senate in January no matter who wins in November, and the HELP Committee has already shown us what it does with antisemitism bills when Bernie Sanders holds the pen,” he said.