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Mike Johnson's Epstein bungling is a disaster for the GOP
The House speaker and his boss put on a masterclass of failure.
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been plotting for almost two months to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and last week all his schemes reached fruition.
No sooner had Democrats in the Senate cravenly surrendered on the shutdown battle than Johnson was forced to finally, after 50 days, swear in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva. She immediately signed the discharge petition mandating release of files relating to sex offender and Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson, in other words, committed an egregious abuse of power for the express purpose of ensuring that a Democratic shutdown loss would be quickly superseded by a loss for the White House and a public explosion of an ugly scandal that exposes deep fault lines in the MAGA coalition.
The speaker’s almost unbelievable incompetence — which is also Trump’s unbelievable incompetence — in no way erases or excuses the failure to defend healthcare for the American people. It is an important reminder though, in a media environment obsessed with Democratic disarray, that Dem bumbling and cowardice is often matched and surpassed by the bumbling cowardice of the right.
The Wile E. Coyote of House procedure
Observing Johnson in recent months has been like watching an especially tedious and extended Road Runner cartoon, where the Coyote fashions intricate knots of congressional procedure in order to tie himself, over the course of weeks, to a giant stack of lit dynamite.
This trap was set over the course of years. It started to take shape during the 2024 campaign, when Trump promised to release files related to federal prosecution of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, accused with his colleague Ghislaine Maxwell of operating a sex trafficking ring to abuse and exploit young women and children. (Epstein died in prison in 2019; Maxwell was convicted in 2021.)
Many on the right called for the release of the Epstein files because they believed they would implicate Democratic figures like former President Bill Clinton. To cater to them, Trump promised to release the files. But Trump himself was close friends with Epstein for years — he had in fact been accused by a woman of raping her at Epstein’s home when she was 13 years old (the accuser in 2016 withdrew a lawsuit related to the allegation). Trump’s compliant Justice Department told him in May that his name was in the files. He and/or his administration subsequently decided not to release them. That seems suspicious, for obvious reasons.
Trump has done little to alleviate those suspicions. Instead, he has continued to do everything in his power to prevent the release of the Epstein files — as has his chief stooge in Congress, Mike Johnson.
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Johnson refused bipartisan calls to bring a bill to the floor requiring the DOJ to release the files. So in early September, conservative Republican Rep. Thomas Massie filed a discharge petition to force a vote. The petition requires a majority of House members to sign on. Every Democrat signed, and so, surprisingly, did rabid MAGA Reps. Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Trump engaged in an active, and successful, lobbying effort to dissuade other Republicans.
In late September, though, Grijalva won her special election and promised to sign the discharge petition as her first act. Hers would have been the last vote needed to pass the petition. But the government shutdown began shortly thereafter, and Johnson responded by closing the House. In an unprecedented abuse of power, he refused to swear Grijalva in for seven weeks.