Congressional Glance
As the two parties square off over an imminent government shutdown, Democrats are accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) of keeping the House of Representatives out of session to delay a vote on the Epstein files.
The House had been scheduled to vote on Monday and Tuesday, but Johnson canceled the votes in order to put more pressure on Senate Democrats to accept a government funding bill Republicans pushed through the House earlier this month.
The canceled votes are also pushing back the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a special election last week to fill her late father’s Arizona seat. Grijalva would provide the crucial 218th signature on a “discharge petition” forcing a vote on legislation to make the Justice Department release its investigatory files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“Any delay in swearing in Representative-elect Grijalva unnecessarily deprives her constituents of representation and calls into question if the motive behind the delay is to further avoid the release of the Epstein files,” Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.), the No. 2 Democrat in the House, complained in a letter to Johnson on Monday.
Senate Democrats on Friday blocked a House-passed bill to fund federal departments and agencies for seven weeks, putting Washington on the path to an Oct. 1 government shutdown.
More than a dozen elected officials were arrested Thursday while protesting conditions at a New York City immigration holding facility where a federal judge this week extended a court order requiring the government to shape up its treatment of detainees.
The Trump administration is asking Congress to approve an additional $58m for security services to protect the members of the executive and judicial branches after the killing of Charlie Kirk, multiple outlets report. They also supported adding more money to protect members of Congress, but they deferred to the legislative branch on further steps.
Two Democratic senators claim they have reached the “inescapable conclusion” that Israel is acting on a systematic plan to destroy and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to force locals to leave, and they say the US is complicit.
