After programming its legislative calendar and staging committee hearings to feed conspiracy theories and persecution fantasies, the 119th Congress appears to be grinding to a halt over the threatened release of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case. Late Monday night, the House rules committee collapsed into chaos as GOP leaders blocked a bipartisan resolution directing the Department of Justice and the FBI to make public the long-debated but stubbornly stationary “Epstein files.”

The standstill came about because the resolution—cosponsored by Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democrat Ro Khanna of California—explictly calls for the Trump White House to secure the documents’ release, while a competing GOP measure expresses just a feeble wish. “Their Epstein bill resolution is nonbinding, so it’s kind of fake,” said Massie, who is facing a MAGA primary challenge over his refusal to vote for Trump’s massive spending bill. “The resolution I have with Khanna would be binding on the president.”

Massie and Khanna had been seeking to have their resolution go to a vote on a discharge petition—a measure that, should it win backing on the rules panel, would proceed directly to a floor vote with 218 signatures from House members supporting it. The prospect of a protracted, and possibly losing, fight over a discharge petition sent the House’s Republican leadership into paralysis.

In other words, the specter of actually using their subpoena power in a substantive way has House GOP leaders shutting down the works altogether. The House had been scheduled to go into summer recess this Thursday, but the meltdown over the Epstein controversy has shut down all business before the rules committee—meaning that the recess effectively starts now, since the committee sets the pending voting schedule for the House. Early Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson made the state of legislative collapse official, and sent the House packing off to recess ahead of schedule.

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In the aftermath of the latest Epstein debacle, House Republicans are waving their hands wildly in what’s become the standard MAGA reply to further Epstein inquiries. “Look, Democrats are yelling and screaming,” said majority leader Steve Scalise, blithely overlooking how his conference has transformed yelling and screaming into the chamber’s MO. Scalise then went into “Hey, look over there!” mode, referencing last week’s symbolic legal action from Trump’s Justice Department to release redacted federal grand jury testimony relating to the Epstein prosecution in the Southern District of New York. “President Trump’s in the courts right now trying to get documents released, and I really think you’re gonna see, hopefully, a lot unsealed from that and then we’ve got some other options.”

But grand jury testimony, by definition, doesn’t represent deep investigative work or a conclusive legal verdict; there’s a reason, after all, that prosecutors have long bragged that they can get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich. Former New York federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff told the Associated Press that any released testimony would cover only the most cursory legal ground. “The Southern District of New York’s practice is to put as little information as possible into the grand jury,” she said. “They basically spoon feed the indictment to the grand jury. That’s what we’re going to see. I just think it’s not going to be that interesting.”

That House leaders are relying on this Trump gimmick to deflect attention away from future Epstein disclosures only fuels the growing suspicion and speculation surrounding the GOP’s slow-walking of Epstein material—particularly after the MAGA mediasphere has loudly and righteously called for full Epstein transparency for years. And it’s far from a good look for the GOP’s Epstein avoidance playbook to put the House into a self-induced legislative coma at a moment when members are pressing to get signature bills in motion ahead of Thursday’s scheduled recess, including yet another measure to increase criminal penalties for undocumented immigration. With the rules committee effectively locked down, the House can only vote on extremely low-profile and noncontroversial legislation, such as a pending bill to expand zip codes—something that also fails to register as robust engagement with the people’s business as members fan out to their home districts for town hall meetings and fundraising appeals.

Democrats have largely lucked into a sound strategic position on the Epstein front thanks to growing fissures within the conservative movement—yet this moment provides a teachable moment for an opposition party still desperately seeking to reclaim political relevance. As the Trump White House continues its lawless assault on basic freedoms and institutions, Democrats have mostly made a theatrical show of sitting on their hands. The latest installment in this slough of despond came last week, when House Democrats rolled over for the White House’s punitive set of rescissions in the federal budget, targeting funding for NPR, PBS, and the already eviscerated US Agency for International Development. As the measure neared the end-of-week deadline for rescissions imposed by the Impoundment Control Act, Democrats instead elected, yet again, to make it appear that they were keeping their powder dry for another deferred future confrontation with the Trump White House. Per a report in Axios, House Democratic leaders advised members that forcing the chamber to breach the deadline “would not have the kind of kill-shot effect some believed.”

But you don’t have to go back far in the sorry litany of Trump wins in Congress to see Democrats rally to the same dubious and defeatist reasoning: It was essentially the same case that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer made when he refused to use the leverage of a pending budget deadline to extract meaningful concessions from the Republican conference. Schumer’s reasoning back then was that Democrats had to focus on the major spending cuts Trump’s White House was going to cram into its major spending bill—and that strategy has since been exposed as an abject failure. Democrats made the same extenuating arguments to avoid dealing with successive impeachment resolutions drafted by Representative Shri Thanedar of Michigan and Al Green of Texas; the true fight was elsewhere, they insisted, and they needed to husband their resources in the minority to make their votes count when it really mattered.

Yet the Epstein fracas makes it clear that the way to effectively wield power in Congress is to force confrontations, particularly when they drive a wedge into the base of the governing party. The same logic that’s inadvertently helped Democrats foment discord within the brittle MAGA coalition could have been employed on many other fronts. In addition to the Democrats’ woeful showing on major budget measures, they also folded on demagogic legislation like the Laken Riley Act, which introduced a regime of brutal immigration crackdowns that are proving to be massively unpopular, and on the bribe-legalizing provisions and deregulatory boons extended to crypto scammers under the farcically named GENIUS Act. One can only pray that the procedural muscle they’ve flexed over the Epstein resolutions won’t once more atrophy when Congress returns in the fall to confront its next budget deadline.