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US Speaker cuts short House session to avoid vote on releasing Epstein file
He made the move to deny Democrats the chance to try to force procedural votes on measures that would call on the Justice Department to make the information public. It reflected how deep divisions among Republicans on the matter have now paralyzed the House, as Republicans seek to avoid a politically perilous vote on a matter that is confounding President Trump and roiling their MAGA base.
'We're done being lectured on transparency,' Johnson said at a news conference, where the typically unflappable speaker appeared frustrated.
He complained about 'endless efforts to politicize the Epstein investigation' and added: 'We're not going to play political games with this,' as he wrapped up his final news conference before September.
Republicans had planned votes this week on an immigration measure, a permitting bill and a rollback of some Biden-era regulations. But the House Rules Committee, the powerful panel controlled by the speaker that determines which legislation reaches the floor, has been upended by the Epstein issue, with Democrats repeatedly demanding votes on it.
Democrats on the committee vowed to force such a vote again this week as part of a routine measure to allow debate on unrelated legislation. But Republicans did not want to go on the record on the matter, for fear of retribution from angry supporters who are demanding the release of Epstein files.
The result is that the House cannot move ahead on any substantive legislation. Republicans now plan to wrap up votes Tuesday and early Wednesday on some noncontroversial bills and call their recess by midafternoon on Wednesday.
After initially saying the material should come out, Johnson on Monday vowed that he would not schedule a vote this summer on whether to release the Epstein files, saying that Trump needed 'space' to determine how to proceed. On Tuesday, he claimed that House Republicans were united on the issue. But they appeared to be far from it.
'Crimes have been committed,' said Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia. 'If there's no justice and no accountability, people are going to get sick of it. That's where people largely are.'
Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina and a member of the Rules panel, criticized his leaders for 'stalling' on the matter. 'The American people deserve action, not excuses,' he wrote on social media on Tuesday. 'Let's vote on it before August recess and get it DONE!!'
And Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, said he still planned to circumvent House Republican leaders and force a vote on releasing the Epstein files in September, with the help of Democrats, using a maneuver known as a discharge petition.
'He just told us in there to stick their heads in the sand about this Epstein thing,' Massie said after a Republican conference meeting, noting that Johnson had offered members no clear explanation of why a vote on the matter needed to be delayed.
'Some here are much more frustrating than others,' Johnson said, referring to Massie. 'I don't know how his mind works, I don't know what he's thinking. He could have brought his discharge petition any time. Now he's clamoring as if there's any sort of timeline.' He ended with some Southern pique: 'Bless his heart.'
On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee also voted to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime partner of Epstein who is serving a 20-year sentence on a sex-trafficking conviction, for a deposition. Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who has pushed for more transparency in the Epstein case, introduced the motion to subpoena Maxwell, and several Republican members supported it.
Greene also expressed skepticism about Maxwell's testimony, noting that she was likely 'bartering for something,' like a presidential pardon.
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She was 'unsure of what to make of' the justices' order, absent more details about what they intended or how they reached their outcome. An appeals court has temporarily paused her ruling. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. A senior White House official who requested anonymity to discuss pending litigation said lower court judges aren't respecting the spirit of the Supreme Court's orders as well as the rulings themselves, and seemed to be taking extraordinary steps to avoid applying them to other cases. The official accused judges of defying the Supreme Court because of policy disagreements. The conflicts are growing as the Trump administration has taken lower court losses to the justices on an emergency basis 21 times so far this year. Unlike cases the court hears on the merits, emergency cases usually don't involve in-person arguments, robust written briefs or lengthy opinions that explain how the majority reached a decision. 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In an emergency order, the Supreme Court considers which side is ultimately likely to succeed on the underlying legal questions, but the justices also focus on the harm each side might suffer in the interim. Tension on the Supreme Court over the escalating shadow docket activity predates Trump's latest term in office. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in 2021 that the conservative majority's use of the process resulted in decisions that were becoming 'more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.' Justice Samuel Alito accused critics of portraying the process as something 'sinister' in order to 'intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.' In remarks to a federal judges' conference on Thursday, Kagan underscored her concerns about the challenges that emergency orders create for lower courts. The justices 'don't usually meet about shadow docket matters and discuss them in the way we do with merits cases,' she said. There is 'a real responsibility that I think we didn't recognize when we first started down this road to explain things better.' The Trump administration's 21 emergency requests in six months exceeds the total number brought by the Biden administration and during the combined presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush, according to research by Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and prominent critic of the court's use of the shadow docket. The government has won 16 of the cases at least in part, even if only temporarily. The administration withdrew one application and largely lost four cases, including one filed by Venezuelans who were at risk of being sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison. Trump's wave of policies testing the bounds of presidential power has been met with a deluge of lawsuits, many of which have included requests by challengers for swift intervention by judges. The Justice Department, in turn, has quickly moved to at least temporarily halt the effects of lower court losses while it appeals. But that strategy hasn't always worked. It took just over two weeks for a federal appeals court in Boston to deny the government's emergency request to resume cuts to scientific research grants that a district judge blocked. In a July 18 order, a three-judge panel said it had 'no difficulty distinguishing' the facts of the case from the justices' emergency order in April letting the administration cut teacher-training grants. The Justice Department on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the grant fight. In its latest emergency application the administration claimed that 'district-court defiance' of the justices' April order 'has grown to epidemic proportions' in other funding cases. A Boston federal judge this month rejected the Justice Department's attempt to 'misguidedly argue' that two other Supreme Court orders required her to let Trump fire Department of Health and Human Services workers. In the first order, the justices said Trump could broadly proceed with a push to shrink the federal workforce but didn't rule on the lawfulness of any agency plan. In the other, the majority didn't offer an explanation when it let layoffs continue at the Education Department. The HHS case was likely to 'wind its way up and down the appellate courts,' US District Judge Melissa DuBose wrote, but 'this court declines the defendants' invitation to short circuit that process.' Soon after the Supreme Court ruled in the mass firing fight, the San Francisco federal judge handling that case rejected the government's argument that it was effectively over. US District Judge Susan Illston wrote that the justices' 'terse order' was 'inherently preliminary' and left issues unsettled. With agencies carrying out layoffs following the Supreme Court's order, she wrote, 'the issues in this case remain of significant public importance.' The Justice Department raced to a federal appeals court, which this week temporarily paused Illston's latest order while it decides what to do. Should the government lose the latest round, it could bring the case back to the justices. With assistance from Suzanne Monyak and Greg Stohr. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
