The House speaker doesn’t want Republicans to be around when the deadline comes.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is conveniently sending Congress home the day before the Justice Department is supposed to release the Epstein files in full. The announcement came Wednesday night.

This looks like yet another instance of Johnson doing every little thing he can either to delay the release of the files or to make it so that his fellow GOPers don’t have to be in town to answer to their complicity in this monthslong campaign to avoid their release—as he did by egregiously delaying the swearing-in of Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva for weeks.

“Like I said: view all political developments for the rest of the week in light of the fact that the Epstein Files are supposed to be released on Friday,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday evening on X. “House Republicans just suddenly canceled Congressional session Friday and are sending everyone home Thursday evening.”

  • JayleneSlide@lemmy.world
    24·
    1 day ago

    We lack the will.

    Kinda, although I fully agree with everything else you said. Collective action is really difficult even when the government isn’t running COINTELPRO-like operations on anyone who tries to organize anything like a mass protest. For an example of the challenge of collective action, think about how hard it is to get your group of close friends to agree on which restaurant to go to and when. And that’s when everyone wants to hang out together, with nobody intentionally mucking up the works.

    If we can overcome the “internal” hurdles to collective action, we can take back the country.