Massie Endangers Democracy By Requiring Government To Follow Law
Congress confronted a fresh threat to American democracy Wednesday after Rep. Thomas Massie secured 218 signatures to force a second House vote on releasing records connected to Jeffrey Epstein, recklessly advancing the theory that laws passed by Congress should produce measurable consequences. The Kentucky Republican’s Epstein Files Transparency Act II follows an earlier transparency bill that passed 427–1 and was signed by President Donald Trump, completing Washington’s customary three-step process of approving a law, celebrating the law and treating questions about compliance as a partisan attack.
The Justice Department has released nearly 3.5 million pages, a quantity officials say should be considered complete because nobody could possibly read that many pages before the next election. Massie and Epstein survivors nevertheless maintain that additional records remain withheld or heavily redacted. His proposal would allow survivors, state attorneys general and members of Congress to sue the attorney general for noncompliance, establishing the dangerous precedent that legislation containing the word “Act” might require someone to act. “This is the most transparent administration in history, and the clearest proof is that we have carefully hidden anything people might misunderstand by seeing it,” Trump said. “If documents were meant to be public, they would not need all those beautiful black rectangles protecting the public from them.”
Massie’s petition drew signatures from all 214 House Democrats and four Republicans, including Massie, Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman and Brian Fitzpatrick. Rep. John Garamendi supplied the 218th signature, cruelly depriving hundreds of lawmakers of their constitutional right to endorse transparency only after resistance became mathematically pointless. Speaker Mike Johnson’s office declined to comment, preserving the House tradition that silence becomes leadership when maintained behind a sufficiently large wooden door. Massie is working with Reps. Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal and Teresa Leger Fernández to advance the measure, despite warnings that enforceable statutes could encourage Americans to demand complete documents, unredacted explanations and other destabilizing luxuries once confined to middle-school civics textbooks. By insisting that the government obey a law it already passed, Massie has placed democracy in grave danger.
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