Full explainer on the situation: All 213 currently-serving House Democrats have signed onto rogue Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie’s discharge petition to force a vote to compel the Justice Department to release everything they have on Jeffrey Epstein. Four Republicans signed on: Massie, Crazy Nancy Mace, QAdulteress Marjorie Taylor Greene, and high school dropout Lauren Boebert, which makes 217. Arizona Dem Congresswoman-Elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election to succeed her late father Raul back in fucking September, will at 4PM be officially sworn in.
Within an hour she’ll sign the petition and it’ll be submitted to the clerk, Rubicon crossed. Then there’s no backing out from forcing every member of the House on the record of whether the Justice Department should release the Epstein files. Assuming every member who signed the discharge petition votes yes it will pass and then nothing will happen because the Senate won’t take it up. If they somehow do and it gets 60 votes then it still has to be signed into law by convicted felon President Trump, which it won’t be, requiring a veto-proof majority in both chambers.
Maybe don’t bet too much against that, who knows. Just having the vote at all will still be a massive coup for Democrats. Some schoolteacher in rural Missouri with a $13,000 war chest can campaign on saying incumbent Congressman Chester Roy McKlansman voted against releasing the Epstein files if they vote no, risk the wrath of the Orange God Emperor if they vote yes. Which makes it very important for the regime to stop this discharge petition from hitting 218 votes in less than five hours from now and the only way to do that is to put pressure on the four Republicans. Massie’s going to be a no since he literally fucking started the petition. Forget Greene. Mace earlier told CNN’s Manu Raju she’s not backing out but she’s gravely mentally ill and can’t be trusted by either side of this.
Which leaves us with Boebert who the network reports has been summoned to an urgent meeting at the White House with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, since the top three law enforcement officials in the richest and most powerful nation on Earth don’t have anything better to do than try to scare the shit out of a divorced 37 year-old grandmother who only got a GED in 2020 because her political staff said it might be a trouble spot for her campaign that was mostly about opposition to emergency COVID restrictions.
The timing on all of this isn’t clear but separately the New York Times’s Annie Karni reports that Trump himself called Boebert very early in the morning to try to get her to back down and has been playing “phone tage” trying to work Mace as well. “So far, they are not planning to remove their names from the petition,” Karni writes as the clock ticks inexorably toward a bad day for MAGA.
Almost time for Krazy Karoline to take the podium and get really mad at reporters: