Typically, members of Congress have the month of August to themselves. Yes, a few constituent meetings may take place here and there, or a small number of high-dollar donor dinners outside of their districts will take up some time. Privately, though, they’ll confess that they’re most looking forward to going on vacation with their families. This August, however, is proving to be a chaotic one. 

Welcome to Washington, where President Trump’s emergency declaration allowing him to deploy uniformed federal troops to the city’s streets will almost certainly come before Congress when it returns in September. It is a show of force, to be sure, that has taken up plenty of airtime on cable news shows and in the inches of newspaper columns, but the debate won’t fall by the wayside the way some usual Trump news cycles go. 

Members of Congress will have to take an up-or-down vote. Mr. Trump has said as much, declaring last week that he would be asking Congress to give him “long-term” powers to run Washington as he sees fit. 

“We’re going to be asking for extensions on that — long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days,” he told reporters during his visit to the Kennedy Center. 

Republicans’ bet is that — as the president’s approval on handling the economy and inflation slump — they can turn the crime issue into a weapon against Democrats. It may be one of the few bright spots for the GOP as some of their own plan to continue their crusade to force a release of the Epstein files the moment they return to the capital. 

Democrats don’t seem to be falling immediately into a defensive position, however. Their voters are demanding fighting for the sake of the fight, and the lawmakers now locked out of power are taking those cues. Feature Senator Chris Murphy. One of the party’s most disciplined messengers refused to even engage with political prognosticating about the crime issue over the weekend. 

“What’s happening here in Washington, D.C., is just a stunt. Donald Trump didn’t like the fact that the walls were closing in on him, that his own base was questioning why he wouldn’t release the Epstein files, why he was protecting very powerful people,” the senator told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. 

“He didn’t want to talk anymore about the fact that our health care system is about to collapse because of the cuts that they have made, that premiums are going to go up by 75 percent on Americans,” Mr. Murphy said. “And so, true to form, he just decided to create a new news cycle.”

“He’s just trying to distract from the stories he doesn’t want Americans to be talking about,” he added. 

The House minority leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, said the same last week. In a statement, the Brooklyn congressman said that “Donald Trump and cowardly Republicans have done nothing to make life more affordable for everyday Americans” and that House Democrats would “stand with residents of the District of Columbia and reject this unjustified power grab as illegitimate.”

The most important part to understand about the Democrats’ own “Tea Party” movement is that the fight itself is the most important thing. It is both a means and an end. It started with Senator Cory Booker’s more than day-long speech on the Senate floor, which coincided with a boost for him in the national poll of Democratic primary voters for the 2028 presidential race. This August, the fight has only gotten more important. 

Although we do not have any polling yet to prove this, it is not unreasonable to assert that Governor Gavin Newsom may soon see his polling numbers among Democrats for 2028 shoot up, as well. The California chief executive just declared a redistricting against Republicans following the Texas GOP’s decision to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade. 

Mr. Newsom’s plan may prove to be short-sighted for the Democrats, given that it could spur Republicans in other states to retaliate with redistricting processes of their own. Yet Mr. Newsom himself is likely to walk away from the whole affair basking in the glow of Democratic voters who want a fighter more than anything else. 

Where this fighting spirit will truly be tested will come in just the next five weeks, when the federal government will need to be funded on a bipartisan basis. If August is any kind of testing ground, it does not seem that voters will be rewarding any Democrat who votes to keep the lights on in Mr. Trump’s White House.