Tensions over Epstein files hamper Republican plan to vote on cuts bill
The House of Representatives faces a Friday deadline to pass the rescissions package demanded by Trump and approved by the Senate in the wee hours of Thursday morning, otherwise the administration will be obligated to spend about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs, and $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.
But before the House can vote on the package, it must be approved by the rules committee. Though the measure is widely expected to have the votes to pass the chamber, the committee on Thursday afternoon had yet to announce a hearing, as Republicans grapple with frustration over Democratic efforts to focus public attention on the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein case.
On Monday, Democrats on the rules committee made two attempts to add language to a cryptocurrency bill that would have required the release of documents related to Epstein, who was accused of running a sex-trafficking ring catering to global elites. Republicans voted those down, and a source familiar with their plans told the Guardian that Democrats plan to propose further Epstein-related amendments when the rules committee convenes to consider the rescissions package.
'Either Republicans take a vote to release the files, or they don't,' the rules committee's top Democrat, Jim McGovern, wrote on X.
The Epstein case has grown into a crisis for Trump and the GOP ever since the justice department announced last week that, after a review of US government files, it had determined the financier's 2019 death in federal custody was a suicide, and that no list of his clients existed to be made public.
Trump's Maga coalition includes believers in a conspiracy theory that the 'deep state' is covering up a global pedophile ring in which Epstein was a major figure, and that files exist to prove it. The president has strenuously denied that his administration is hiding anything, and insulted those who call for the documents' release as 'weaklings' who fell for a 'radical left' hoax intended to discredit him.
Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chamber of Congress, have seized on that tension with an array of legislative maneuvers intended to make public any Epstein-related documents. On Tuesday, House speaker Mike Johnson told a conservative podcaster who asked about the case: 'It's a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.'
Meanwhile, Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, is trying to get a majority of the House to sign on to a petition that will force a vote on releasing the files, and has already received signatures from nine GOP lawmakers.
The rescissions passage passed the House in June, but the chamber must vote on it again after the Senate declined to cut funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created in 2003 under the Republican president George W Bush.
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