Mike Johnson dealt BAD NEWS on Epstein LIVE on air

Mike Johnson dealt BAD NEWS on Epstein LIVE on air

at seated representative elect Adalita Grahalva. There’s now a lawsuit about this. They say there’s no dispute about her election or her qualifications and add this. Speaker Johnson wishes to delay seating Miss Grahalva to prevent her from signing a discharge petition that would force a vote on the release of the Epstein files andor to strengthen his hand in the ongoing budget and appropriations negotiations. Why hasn’t she been sworn in? What’s your response to the lawsuit? Oh, this is so ridiculous and we could take 30 minutes and talk about all this, but Grahava replet Grahava will be sworn in as soon as we get back to regular session. Remember, it’s the Democrats who shut the Congress down, so we can’t do that. Um, can you not swear her in though when you’re not operating in regular There is a precedent for doing a pro-form session swearing in, but we’re not engaging in regular business right now. And what I’m doing is following the Pelosi president in pa in the past when she was speaker and you had uh representatives elected during special election special situations. When Congress was on recess or out, she would wait until the regular session to do it. I’m doing the exact same thing. But the Epstein thing is a complete red herring. It’s a distraction from what’s going on right now and them causing harm to the American people with the shutdown. The Epstein estate documents are out. The Epstein files are out. 43,000 pages so far. More on the way. subpoenas are are being uh complied with. The House Oversight Committee, which is filled with some of the biggest uh guard dogs in Congress on the right and the left, Republican and Democrat, are dug in deeply in the last two weeks while we’ve been on on uh on shutdown. They’ve released uh the flight logs, the personal financial ledgers, the daily calendars of Epstein himself. The lawyers are continuing to dig through and release all that. We’re for maximum transparency. Always have been. They’re using this for a political issue and and it’s patently obvious what’s going on here. Some breaking news courtesy of Mike Johnson. Apparently, Republicans are for maximum transparency as it relates to the Epstein files and that thousands of files have already been released, which sounds great. Only small problem, the ones that the oversight committee has released, about 33,000 pages from the DOJ, 97% of those were already public. Meanwhile, the DOJ is holding on to hundreds of thousands of pages which have not been released despite Pam Bondi saying this way back months ago. The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. Will that really happen? It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. Um that’s been a directive um by President Trump. I’m reviewing that. I’m reviewing JFK files, MLK files. That’s all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies. And yet, despite the fact that Mike Johnson can unilaterally compel the release of the Epstein files by bringing the issue to the floor for a vote, not only is he not doing that, he is actually preventing representative electva from being sworn in because she would be the 218th vote on the discharge petition to compel the release of those very files. In other words, the irony should not be lost on any of us that the guy who is grandstanding about maximum transparency is quite literally the one person standing in the way of any transparency. Mike Johnson also invokes the Pelosi precedent, but what he won’t tell you is that then Speaker Pelosi waited 25 days to swear in a lawmaker because that lawmaker asked Pelosi to be sworn in on a specific date. In this scenario, Grahalva has been pleading with Mike Johnson to swear her in and posting videos like this. Hi, it’s me again, still Aalita and still Congresswoman elect. I have not been sworn in. It’s been 36 days since our election and we have surpassed waiting the longest of anyone in recent history. And so, if you’re sick of me coming on and saying I’m still not yet sworn in, guess what? I’m sick of it, too. I want to be sworn in working for Arizona and being at the table when these important discussions are being made. And so I want to thank you all for your support continuing to follow this journey and as soon as I have an update I’ll let you know. So yeah, not exactly the Pelosi president, is it? And of course, Mike Johnson brings up the fact that he undermined his own rule about swearing in members elect during pro-form sessions when he swore in two Republican lawmakers during proforma sessions just months ago, which puts on full display the broader point here that Republicans will literally make up any rule that suits them in that moment. Remember when Merrick Garland was nominated by Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell decided by fiat that the new standard became you cannot give a hearing to a Supreme Court nominee when the Senate is a different party than the president during an election year completely made up out of whole cloth. But they needed to put forward some excuse any excuse to serve as some tenuous basis to refuse to vote on Obama’s nominee. And frankly, even if it wasn’t an election year, it would have been some other excuse. You can’t give a hearing to a nominee in a cycle where the party opposite the president took any majority in Congress. You can’t have a hearing if there wasn’t a national census in the previous five years. You can’t have a hearing if the nominees birthday fell on a Tuesday of that year. It doesn’t matter what the excuse is or how nonsensical it is or how untethered to reality it is. The point is that they will latch on to any excuse to prevent democracy from working if it’s not working in their favor. And look, my thinking all along is that this is a short-sighted strategy for Mike Johnson because at some point he’s going to have to swear in Adelaide Grahalva and that all he’s doing right now is buying himself one day at a time. But I spoke about the prospect of Mike Johnson indefinitely preventing Grahalva from being sworn in with Congressman Dan Goldman. Here’s what he had to say. Look, he can’t keep uh Representative Elect Grahalva out of the House forever. At some point, he’s going to have to swear her in. Maybe look, maybe like maybe he’s thinking like, “Oh, try me.” You know, challenge accepted. But the reality is at some point she’s going to have to come in. She will sign this discharge petition. It it we’ll be in a situation where it should then come to the floor for a vote. But even then, I mean, if Mike Johnson is willing to keep her out of the house for as long as he has, almost 3 weeks, when usually these representative elects uh are sworn in within 24 hours, then who knows what he’ll do when the rules, the norms stipulate that that a discharge position has to come to the floor. Let me give you an example. Um when Trump implements tariffs uh under some of these statutes, it is required to come before Congress in order to be essentially ratified. Congress gets a say to uh endorse the tariffs and the rationale for the tariffs. And you’ve got it requires I think there are 15 uh session days before it is ripe to come to the floor. Mike Johnson literally put in one of the rules that they Republicans generally have to pass in order to bring a bill to the floor for a simple majority vote. He literally put in the rules that the clock on that particular bill introduced by uh House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Greg Meeks would stop. So it would never get to 15 days and it would never be ripe for a vote so that the Republicans would never have to vote on Trump’s tariffs. So that that just shows you the lengths that he will go to to avoid normal process, regular order, and frankly what the statute and law requires uh to protect Donald Trump and to supplicate himself uh to to the president. So again, for these Republicans, when we expect them to play by the rules, we’re only exposing ourselves as fools. They are not playing the same game as us. They are not partners in democracy. They’ll cosplay as a small D democratic party when it suits them and completely abandon democracy when it doesn’t. Here it doesn’t. And frankly, when the left yells, “Well, that’s not fair. Uh, those aren’t the rules.” All we do is expose our own naivity because they have told us every which way a thousand times over that they do not care about the rules. Again, we’re playing different games. And the only thing worse than the what the GOP is doing is Democrats inability to recognize it. Which is why it will not suffice to reason with these people. We have to defeat them. We have to make sure that they never hold power again. This is no way to govern. You wouldn’t get on the soccer field where one team is at full strength and the other team has bricks tied to their ankles, would you? That’s what’s happening here. Democrats will never win against a Republican party for whom rules don’t exist. And now those same Republicans are in the process of entrenching their majorities forever. So I’m asking everybody watching to find your circles of people and make them your responsibility. Find 5 6 7 8 9 10 people. Make sure they know the stakes of midterms. Make sure they know the stakes of this upcoming election just a few days from now. If they live in New Jersey or Virginia or Pennsylvania, voting is open. If they live in California, make sure they vote for Prop 50 to counteract the GOP’s power grab in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. This is a five alarm fire and we need everyone on board to ensure that we don’t lose our democracy forever. [Music] Before you go, if you enjoyed this content and you want to see more and support independent media, please subscribe to this channel. The subscribe button will be right here on the screen. But second, the reality is that we are now in a political environment where this administration can lean on any of the social media platforms to suppress certain voices if they don’t like critical coverage. That means my longevity here is in the hands of a few tech billionaires who are already making it clear that they are willing to cater to this administration. To that end, signing up for my newsletter is a way for me to reach you directly if that ever becomes necessary. I’ll put the link right here on the screen as well. So, please sign up. 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