All year, congressional Democrats have been mocked for not fighting President Donald Trump and the Republican congressional majority hard enough, despite the limited tools available to the minority party. So, let’s give some credit where credit is due.
House Democrats, by planning to force votes on measures requiring the release of materials from the Jeffrey Epstein case, just pressured Speaker Mike Johnson to send his members home early for the summer and delay votes on right-wing legislation.
Back in March, House Democrats fed a “Democrats-in-disarray” narrative when, during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, a few backbenchers heckled the president and held protest signs against the counsel of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Some in the Democratic diaspora complained that Jeffries was soft. Others complained that the backbenchers looked impotent.
At the time, I argued that the complaints overlooked that polls were showing that Democratic attacks on Trump’s decimation of the civil service and Medicaid cuts—the precursor to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill—were hitting the mark. Still, consternation about congressional Democratic leadership has persisted among Democrats and likely explains why polls also show Democratic Party favorability is at record lows.
Four months later, Democrats landed so many blows on the One Big Beautiful Bill that it’s become one of the most unpopular pieces of primary legislation in modern history. In the Good Politics/Bad Politics newsletter, Julia Azari compared polling for it to contemporaneous polling for the 1981 tax cut, the 1994 crime bill, the 2001 tax cut, the 2009 Recovery Act, and the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The One Big Beautiful Bill was the only one underwater, with 38 percent in favor and 59 percent opposed in a Fox News poll sampled just before final passage.
The bill did pass because Republicans in Congress, following an extended period of political kabuki, maintained near-perfect unity. Democrats, however, were also unified in opposition, denying the legislation any bipartisan sheen. Three days after Trump signed the bill, his Justice Department announced, “We found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials” in the Epstein case, despite teasing a big reveal for months. As the MAGA hordes had been primed to expect their conspiracy theories validated by full disclosure, Republican unity cracked, and a united Democratic Party pounced.
House Democrats have taken every opportunity to force votes on amendments to unrelated measures that would require disclosure, squeezing Republicans between their conspiracy-minded base and their usually-conspiracy-minded president. That includes votes in the House Rules Committee, where legislation goes just before being sent to the House floor.
On Monday, The New York Times suggested that Trump had cleverly quelled intra-party dissent by attacking The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of his relationship with Epstein: “Mr. Trump turned one of the most fractious moments for his base into one of the most unifying by tapping into other MAGA grievances: the deep mistrust of mainstream media, the disdain for Rupert Murdoch and the belief that the president had been unfairly persecuted by his political foes.”
That was disproven the next day, also in the pages of The New York Times: “Republicans had planned action this week on a measure targeting some undocumented immigrants, a bill that would ease environmental rules and a rollback of some Biden-era regulations. Those votes were all put on hold after the House Rules Committee, the powerful panel controlled by the speaker that determines which legislation reaches the floor, was upended by the Epstein issue. They have been under pressure from constituents who have been flooding their offices with phone calls and targeting them on social media, demanding they fight harder for the release of the Epstein files.”
If Speaker Johnson had complete control of the Republicans on the Rules committee, he would have kept the House in session, told Republicans to reject Democratic amendments no matter what they are, and gotten what all Republicans seem to want: more legislation harming immigrants and the environment. But the prospect for congressional Republicans of facing the MAGA hordes in their districts during the August recess after voting against disclosure must have been too terrifying. So Johnson decided to skip town instead.
Whether Johnson will successfully buy Republicans time for the Epstein fervor to die down, or whether he has only delayed an eventual reckoning until September, remains to be seen. Lurking is a bipartisan discharge petition, led by Republican Representative Tom Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California, to force a floor vote on a bill requiring disclosure. The Speaker can’t stop a vote with 218 signatures on a discharge petition. Eleven Republicans are co-sponsors of the underlying Massie-Khanna bill, which would be more than enough to join with Democrats and get to 218, but we don’t know if they would take that step.
If nothing else, by keeping up the pressure on Epstein and compelling Johnson to turn out the lights, House Democrats have chewed up precious days on the legislative calendar. The longer it takes for Republicans to pass their agenda items, the fewer they can pass before the 119th Congress is over. That’s about as much as you can expect an opposition party to do. Give them credit for doing it.
