TRUMP IS A FLATULENT FRAUD, A CORRUPT BIGOT, AND A RAPIST...

 

CAN THE COUNTRY SURVIVE?

 

DAVE BARRY

 

Marriage and Dementia

I forgot my point.

Dave Barry

Apr 21, 2025

Before you read this article, please take the following brief quiz:

1. Are you married?

HOW TO SCORE:

If you answered "No," you do not need to read this article. If you answered "Yes," or if you don't remember taking a quiz, I have some disturbing news for you.

I refer to a study by researchers at Florida State University, who studied the relationship between marriage and dementia. Their study produced a surprising finding, which is summarized by this headline from the Independent:

Twist as marriage now linked to an increased risk of dementia

That's right: According to this study, if you're married, you're more likely to develop dementia than if you're single. As the Independent article states: "This study challenges the idea that marriage is automatically good for brain health."

Does this mean that if we're married and we don't want to become demented, we should immediately get a divorce? Yes.

NO! I mean, no. Of course not. It means that we should try to understand what it is about marriage that might cause a person's mental capacity to decline.

I personally have been married for over 600 years, so I feel qualified to weigh in on this. My theory is that after you've been married for a while, you outsource certain tasks from your brain to your spouse's brain, and the part of your brain that used to perform those tasks develops what brain scientists refer to as "brain rust."

For example, let's say Michelle and I want to watch a certain TV show that we've heard is good. First we have to figure out where it is. In the olden days, of course, we'd know exactly where it was: It was on television. But now it could be virtually anywhere — Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Tubi, Fubo, Max, Peacock, Feeboo, Skeeter, Emu, Fafo, Bazooty, Skeeter Prime or any of the dozens of other streaming services that we may or may not be paying for — there is no way to tell — and almost certainly do not remember the login name or password for.

Once we've figured out where the show is — this can take several days — I go to The Basket. This is a basket on our coffee table that, from the outside, appears rustic and harmless.

 

But lurking inside The Basket is our scarily large collection of remote controls, some of them dating back to the Spanish-American War.

 

It's my job to determine which remote controls we need — it can take more than one — and manipulate them in such a way that we are able to watch the show. Michelle never does this. At this point I don't think she could do it. A couple of times I've tried to explain my procedure to her. ("OK, you see this button here? Do NOT press it.") But it's hopeless. The part of her brain that in an unmarried human would handle remote controls is rusted solid from lack of use.

Another aspect of our lives that I'm responsible for is plumbing. When one of our toilets goes awry, it is my job, and mine alone, to point out that "Toilets Gone Awry" would be a good name for a rock band. But it's also my job to repair the toilet. And by "repair the toilet," I of course mean "call the plumber."

Michelle almost never talks to the plumber. The plumbing sector of her brain is now a nonfunctional rust glob. Whereas I talk to the plumber a lot, especially lately, because we're installing a new septic system. This is something that, like many couples, we've always dreamed of doing, and we finally decided, what the heck, we're not going to live forever, let's just DO it. As the plumbing specialist in our marriage, I am deeply involved in this project, not in the sense of doing any of the actual work, but in the sense of taking pride in our new septic tank, which is larger than many New York City apartments.

So in two crucial areas of our married life — plumbing and remote controls — my brain handles the thinking for both of us. I also am in charge of some other areas, including:

— Turning off every single light in the house at least six times a day.

-- Opening any mail we receive from financial institutions and, after frowning thoughtfully at the contents for 8 to 10 seconds, putting them in a "file."

-- Spiders.

-- Making sure we arrive at the airport at least four hours before the scheduled departure time of our flight because You Never Know.

But there are other areas that my brain does not concern itself with, because I have come to rely on Michelle to think about them. One example is pillows. I never have to think about pillows, because Michelle apparently thinks about them 24/7, the result being that we have acquired enough pillows to blockade the Canadian border. Michelle is also extremely good at detecting odors, so I don't have to. Here's a conversation we have often:

MICHELLE: Do you smell that?

ME: Smell what?

MICHELLE: You can't smell that?

But Michelle's biggest mental responsibility is thinking for both of us about other people. I used to be involved with other people, but over time I outsourced pretty much all social interactions to Michelle, to the point where my only regular human contact, aside from Michelle, is the plumber. As a result, the social part of my brain now has the same level of neural activity as a rutabaga. This means that whenever we encounter another person, I depend on Michelle to supply me with critical information such as:

-- Who is this person?

-- Do I know this person?

-- Am I related to this person?

-- Do I have to talk to this person?

-- If so, what should I say?

Because I never know who anybody is, I try to avoid people altogether. If Michelle and I are walking in our neighborhood, and we see somebody approaching, my immediate instinct is to hide behind something — a mailbox if necessary — whereas hers is to engage the person in conversation. As they converse, it quickly becomes obvious to me that we know this person, by which I mean that Michelle knows this person and I should know this person. But I can't just say to Michelle, in front of the person, "Who IS this person?"

So what happens is, Michelle and the person start chatting, while I remain mute, smiling brightly in an effort to appear delighted to be part of this social interaction. After about a minute I start casually sidling away so as to indicate to Michelle that we need to move along. Michelle is a talker, so sometimes I will sidle a full 30 feet — enough for a first down — before she notices that I'm gone. Then she'll say goodbye to the person, catch up with me and reveal the person's name, which will go into my ears but immediately bounce off my brain without penetrating.

Anyway, if my theory is correct, it explains the results of the Florida State University study. Essentially, married couples have just one fully functioning brain between them. If you test married people's brains individually, you're going to see a mental dropoff, because of the outsourcing.

I suspect another contributing factor is children, which many married people have. Children take a serious toll on the adult human brain. Every time you start to read "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," two million of your brain cells elect to commit suicide rather than go through that again.

So to summarize what we know:

1. The institution of marriage is vital for the survival of human society.

2. But marriage makes us stupid.

3. Therefore, some kind of helpful conclusion should go here.

A COMPLETE SCUMBAG BUT THE MAGAt REPUBLICANS DON'T CARE

 

But His Emils

Emil Bove III, Trump’s hatchet-man in the Justice Department, is now an appellate court judge of the Third Circuit.

Jay Kuo

Jul 30, 2025

Emil Bove III is confirmed as a judge on the Third Circuit. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM.

 

The GOP-controlled Senate demonstrated once again that they are willing to abdicate their constitutional duty by ramming through and rubber stamping one of the worst—if not the worst—judicial appointment in our nation’s history: Trump’s erstwhile personal criminal attorney, Emil Bove III.

The vote was 50-49, with one GOP absence and only two GOP defectors (Sens. Collins (R-ME) and Murkowski (R-AK)), despite everything we know about Bove and how damaging to the basic rule of law he has already been.

It’s important to be clear-eyed about the lackey the Senate actually just approved, just as it was important to understand the deplorable nature of Trump’s other successful nominees. Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr., for example, are turning out as bad or worse than Democrats had warned, leading GOP senators to admit they were wrong to confirm them.

For the sake of demonstrating later that we were correct to warn everyone today, let’s sift through the destructive rubble Emil Bove III has already created as he took a sledgehammer to the pillars of our constitutional governance. Then let’s assess what his lifetime appointment to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals could mean. Spoiler: There’s a bit of a silver lining here.

Prosecuting the January 6 prosecutors

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, Bove served as the acting head of the Justice Department before Pam Bondi was confirmed as the new Attorney General. Bove used that temporary position to begin to insert raw partisan politics into what should have been non-political law enforcement. As the Los Angeles Times noted,

Before this year, the Justice Department held to a tradition of keeping politics out of law enforcement. But Bove and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi saw their missions as carrying out the wishes of President Trump.

One of Bove’s most outrageous moves was to go after, on Trump’s behalf, the FBI prosecutors and agents who had anything to do with the January 6 criminal investigations and prosecutions. These even included cases against dangerous criminal insurrectionists and rioters. As the LA Times reported, Bove laid out

plans for retribution against the prosecutors and investigators who brought charges against him or the 1,500 Trump allies who stormed the Capitol and fought with police.

Specifically, as CBS reported in February, Bove ordered the FBI to compile a list of all current and former employees who were assigned “at any time” to a January 6 investigation. The purpose was “to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary,” according to an internal department memo. Agents across the country were asked to complete questionnaires about their involvement in the January 6 and Trump probes as part of a department-wide “evaluation” of the workforce.

This was manifestly unfair and improper. Whatever your “politics” around January 6, punishing FBI employees who were simply assigned to work on these cases amounted to gross political retribution. Bove intentionally targeted civil servants who were properly seeking to hold Trump and others accountable for their crimes.

It cannot be understated what kind of immediate and long-lasting chill this placed on the Justice Department and FBI. Bove’s message was clear: If you work on any case against Trump or his supporters, your job will be on the line whenever the GOP next returns to power. This policy was designed to undercut federal law enforcement’s ability to hold future criminal politicians accountable. Along with the blessing from the Supreme Court that presidents have immunity from prosecution for all official actions, Bove’s attack on the frontline prosecutors and agents has encouraged violations of the law today and empowered those who choose to do it.

Per the same reporting in the LA Times, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who opposed Bove’s nomination along with every other Senate Democrat, drew attention to how this move also ratified the violent mob’s behavior and attack on police officers on January 6:

“When Trump wanted to purge the department of prosecutors who had proved to juries beyond a reasonable doubt that the violent offenders who attacked police officers that day did so to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, Emil Bove was there to punish not the criminals, but the prosecutors.”

Together with Trump’s mass pardon of the January 6 defendants, undoing years of arduous investigative work and lengthy court trials with tens of thousands of work and jury hours, Bove helped drive the point home: The Justice Department is now nothing more than a tool for Trump to use against his political enemies.

Brokering the corrupt Eric Adams deal

Bove remained Trump’s No. 3 at the Justice Department after Bondi was confirmed. In that position, he continued to train his sights not on criminal defendants but on the prosecutors who had obtained indictments against them. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

As I wrote about back in February, federal prosecutors indicted Adams in 2024 for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bribery and for soliciting and accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes from wealthy Turkish nationals.

Desperate to get out from under the federal charges, Adams went to Trump and claimed that he, too, was a “victim” of overzealous prosecutors and the Biden administration. Adams “praised parts of Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later,” according to the New York Times.

Adams’s shameless obsequiousness was rewarded not long after. In a memo, Bove directed the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, to cease all further investigations of Adams until her successor was confirmed by the Senate.

Bove’s rationale? The charges “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Trump’s efforts to crack down on migrants” and had “improperly interfered” with Adams’s re-election campaign. In short, Bove provided political justifications for dropping the charges, with no rationales related to the actual facts, evidence or law of the case.

Sassoon, who is herself a conservative Federalist Society member, bravely and famously pushed back in an eight-page letter for the ages to Attorney General Pam Bondi, methodically demolishing Bove’s assertions in the memo. And she inserted what has become known simply as Footnote 1, which law students one day will study in ethics courses:

I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.

Bove took this badly. He not only fired back at Sassoon on Bondi’s behalf, blasting her handling of the case and her decision to disobey a direct order, he also put other prosecutors who had worked with her on leave. He threatened her whole team with investigations—once more creating a chill across the Department after one had already washed over it with the January 6 internal department witch-hunts.

In his response, Bove managed to fit in a wince-inducing pledge of fealty to Trump that gets the oath of office completely backwards: “In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” he wrote, “and anyone romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and the public’s perception of our efforts.”

With Sassoon and her team off the case, Bove tried to send the matter to the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department in D.C., but the two heads of that section quit. Bove then went down the chain of command, and it was quit, quit, quit. This became the “Thursday Afternoon Massacre” resulting in six public resignations, including Sassoon’s.

Pressuring DOJ to defy court orders

The most recent “Bove trove” comprises whistle-blower complaints and exhibits from within the Justice Department. The most comprehensive of these was filed by Erez Reuveni, a respected career attorney with 15 years of experience in the department. He alleged that Bove was one of the principal proponents of a plan within the Department to defy the courts.

As I wrote about back in June, Reuveni filed a 35-page complaint after being terminated for refusing to sign his name to a brief that contained untrue allegations about Kilmar Abrego García, who was finally returned to the U.S. from illegal rendition to and imprisonment in El Salvador.

In a meeting on March 14, Bove informed his subordinates that Trump was going to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to fly a group of immigrants out of the country. Bove told them that the planes needed to take off no matter what. Reuveni’s complaint then dropped this bombshell:

“Bove stated that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order. Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room.”

The White House dismissed these allegations as the rantings of a disgruntled employee, but Reuveni produced email and text receipts to back up his claims.

A second person then came forward with information just before the Senate vote to confirm Bove. As The Hill reported,

A second whistleblower has now stepped forward to back Reuveni’s claims, saying Bove and other senior DOJ officials were “actively and deliberately undermining the rule of law.”

“Our client, whose identity we are protecting, has provided substantive, internal DOJ documents to the Inspector General, supporting former senior DOJ attorney-turned whistleblower Erez Reuveni’s allegations,” Whistleblower Aid, the group representing the second whistleblower, said in a press release.

“Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint exposes ‘high-level governmental personnel [at the DOJ who] knowingly and willfully defied court orders, directed their subordinate attorneys to make misrepresentations to courts, and engaged in a scheme to withhold relevant information from the court to advance the Administration’s priority of deporting noncitizens.’”

As an official near the top of the chain of command within the Department of Justice, Bove could be found in contempt for defying Judge James Boasberg’s direct order to turn planes bearing migrants around before they landed in El Salvador. That investigation is still pending.

From corrupt Justice Department to compromised judiciary

The twist in the plot is this: Now that he is a federal judge with a lifetime appointment, Bove may eventually have to face a federal contempt of court investigation and possible charges as a member of the judiciary. And Trump may have to consider pulling out his pardon autopen for his former personal criminal attorney. Given whom else Trump has pardoned or is considering pardoning (including convicted sex trafficker and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell), we shouldn’t think for a moment that Trump wouldn’t do it for his own attorney.

Apart from possible criminal contempt charges, a stronger case for a House impeachment of a member of the federal judiciary hardly exists, and that’s with Justice Clarence Thomas vying for the top spot. While this Senate would almost certainly never convict and remove Bove given the need for 67 votes, for the sake of the rule of law the House Judiciary Committee should open investigations into Bove if the Democrats regain control of that chamber after the 2026 midterms.

But at least he can do less harm…?

I promised you a silver lining to this depressing tale, and it is this: As a Trump appointee on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the U.S. Virgin Islands (ahem), the ability of Bove to do real damage will be more constrained than it was while he held No. 3 stop at the Justice Department. Going forward, Bove’s will be one voice among many, and he can still be outvoted 2-1 on any panel.

We should be on the lookout, however, for any plans to elevate Bove to a justice on the Supreme Court at the next retirement. He would be a more reliably fascist and anti-Constitutional vote than even Justices Alito or Thomas.

As he made clear in his letter to Sassoon, there is no daylight in Bove’s mind between the Constitution and the Presidency. The former is there to serve the latter, end of story, assuming of course the latter is Trump or another MAGA Republican. And that’s about as upside down a view of constitutional law as you can arrive at, whether you’re inside the Justice Department or on the bench in the Third Circuit.

Trump’s Texas Gerrymander Is Supercharging a New War on Democracy

 

Trump’s Texas Gerrymander Is Supercharging a New War on Democracy

Texas Republicans just unveiled a shocking plan to give their party five new House seats.

ari Berman

National Voting Rights Correspondent

Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 midterms became crystal clear on Wednesday, as Texas Republicans introduced a new congressional redistricting map that would give their party five new seats in the US House, making it much more difficult for Democrats to retake the chamber next November.

The map is designed to give Republicans control of nearly 80 percent of the state’s House delegation, though Trump only won 56 percent of the vote there in 2024. The plan creates 30 districts that Trump would have carried by 10 points or more, up from 25 seats in the current map.

Republicans accomplished this feat by drawing more Republicans into the seats of two vulnerable Democrats in South Texas, Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales Jr., and eliminating Democratic-held seats in Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. No Republican-held seats became significantly more competitive as a result.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

New districts are typically redrawn following the decennial census, and it’s highly unusual to redraw them mid-decade, absent a court order. Texas did it once before in 2003, under the orders of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but the legislature at that time redrew districts that had been drawn by a court. This time, the GOP-controlled legislature is redrawing maps that were drawn by that very legislature, which is virtually unprecedented.

“The maps are already bad,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “Now they’re getting worse.”

Texas State Sen. Phil King, chair of the senate’s special committee on redistricting, said the new map was drawn by GOP redistricting operative Adam Kincaid, who authored the 2021 Texas redistricting maps that civil rights groups are challenging as racially discriminatory and is executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which was founded after the 2020 census to “coordinate the GOP’s 50-state redistricting effort.” 

The brazenly partisan nature of the re-gerrymandering of the state undercuts the stated rationale for the special session provided by the Justice Department, which claimed earlier this month in a letter to Texas that four congressional districts, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, constituted “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

Voting rights experts, Democrats, and even Texas Republicans have since debunked that argument. Justin Levitt, a high-ranking official in the Obama Justice Department, called the letter “a fig leaf, if you think one is necessary, to give the governor an excuse to redistrict.”

The DOJ letter claimed that coalition districts, in which different minority groups form a combined majority of the voting population, violate the Voting Rights Act, citing a 2023 opinion by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country. But the Fifth Circuit’s decision, while holding that states like Texas are not required to draw coalition districts under the Voting Rights Act, did not say that existing coalition districts must be dismantled, as the DOJ letter claims. Nor has the Supreme Court weighed in yet on that decision.

Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testified before the Texas Senate that the Justice Department’s argument was “factually wrong” and “littered with errors.”

And Texas Republicans have repeatedly asserted that they drew the current redistricting maps “race-blind,” contradicting the DOJ’s claims. “I’ve certainly never seen any indication that any map that has been passed out of this legislature, anytime I’ve been in the legislature, would violate in any way the Voting Rights Act,” said State Rep. Cody Visut, the Republican chair of the House special redistricting committee.

Democrats in the Texas legislature have sought to subpoena the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, a close Trump ally who authored the DOJ letter, to compel her to testify.

If anything, the 2021 maps give too little representation to communities of color, argue civil rights groups who are challenging it in court. Ninety-five percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.

Trump’s new plan makes that problem worse, by targeting districts held by minority representatives, including Representatives Al Green in Houston and Greg Cesar in Austin.

“This map is racist, it’s illegal, and it’s part of a long, ugly tradition of trying to keep Black and Brown Texas from having a voice,” said Democratic Rep. Marc Veasey.

Blue states could retaliate in response to Texas’ new map but their options are more limited. California and New York, where Democrats could pick up the greatest number of new seats, have independent redistricting commissions and prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering that make any mid-decade redistricting effort more complex. And Democrats have already come close to maximizing the number of representatives in other blue states, such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing forward with mid-decade redistricting in Ohio and floating similar schemes in states including Florida, Indiana, and Missouri.

Trump, with the help of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, is supercharging a new race to the bottom, using re-redistricting as the latest tool in his ever-growing war on democracy. As his popularity sinks and a majority of the public disapproves of his handling of every major issue, the president seems to believe that the only way his party can win is if election outcomes are predetermined in their favor.

“The president and his party are afraid of the voters,” former Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Senate Democrats on Wednesday, “and they’re trying to manipulate the maps in Texas so that they can rig the elections in 2026.”

 

Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Worsens as Dems Suddenly Find Big New Weapon

 

Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Worsens as Dems Suddenly Find Big New Weapon

Senate Democrats are using a 1928 law to pressure Trump to release the Epstein files. The White House will ignore them. Here’s what could happen next.

 

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but they also call for creative ones. Faced with a criminal president and a GOP congressional majority that’s wholly devoted to shutting down any and all transparency and accountability for him, Democrats will have to get increasingly resourceful in their efforts to crack through that facade. The very tentative good news is: They actually have options to do just that.

This is why you should pay attention to the news that Senate Democrats are now exercising an obscure, rarely used law to try to force transparency on the so-called Epstein files.

The New York Times reports that seven Democrats on the upper chamber’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee just sent a letter to DOJ demanding that it turn over the information it has compiled related to the investigation pursuant to the 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, using a decades-old statute:

Under a section of federal law commonly referred to in the Senate as the “rule of five,” government agencies are required to provide relevant information if any five members of that committee, which is the chamber’s chief oversight panel, request it.

The letter spells out exactly what Democrats are demanding, calling for the release of “all documents, files, evidence, or other materials in the possession of DOJ or FBI related to” Epstein’s prosecution, including “audio and video recordings” and much more.

This is a good move. Let’s start with the law in question: It states that if “any five members” of that Senate committee request “any information” that is “related to any matter within the jurisdiction of that committee,” the relevant executive agency “shall” submit it. There’s a companion provision for the House.

A historical parallel here is worth noting. This 1928 law was passed in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal, according to David Vladeck, a professor of government at Georgetown. That scandal, which involved a corrupt Cabinet member under President Warren Harding taking bribes in exchange for oil leases, resulted in higher public awareness of governmental corruption and the need for better congressional oversight to ensure transparency.

Critically, though, the statute that Senate Democrats are now invoking, Vladeck says, was originally designed to “ensure that the minority” in Congress “has real access to what executive agencies are doing.” As you may have noticed, this is a particularly urgent need right now: Democratic efforts at oversight have been entirely blocked by the GOP majority, which is devoted to protecting Trump at all costs.

House GOP leaders literally shut down a vote on whether to release the Epstein materials. And while there are scattered indications that some Republicans do want to force more transparency on the White House this fall, after congressional recess ends, it’s easy to imagine nothing coming of that, especially if and when Trump commands them to stand down.

Enter this new effort by Senate Democrats. There are reasons to think it might do some good.

Obviously the Justice Department will ignore the demand. But Senate Democrats can then try to take the administration to court. “The Justice Department has to comply,” congressional scholar Norman Ornstein told me. “If they refuse, Senate Democrats need to sue the attorney general and the Justice Department for failure to comply with the law.”

Democrats seem to agree, as Democratic leader Chuck Schumer appeared to confirm at a press conference on Wednesday. “This is the law,” Schumer said. “This can be challenged in the courts.”

Congressional procedure expert Sarah Binder says the whole matter will then turn on what the courts say. “The statute is very clear—agencies shall provide these documents,” Binder told me. “The question is whether the courts would agree that a group of senators, as opposed to the whole chamber, has standing to sue.”

Here there’s reason for (very) cautious optimism. House Democrats got pretty far the last time this was attempted. They invoked the statute in 2017 to try to force the first Trump administration to divulge information related to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which raised many ethical issues.

Importantly, an appeals court ruled that House Democrats did have standing to bring this lawsuit. And the Supreme Court even agreed to hear the case in 2023. But that never happened because the Democrats ended the lawsuit after they received the documents they’d sought.

Now this same question could be considered by the high court, only this time on the Epstein case. Vladeck, who was involved in the previous litigation, says he thinks this is likely, precisely because the courts already tilled so much relevant ground in that litigation. Appeals courts will rule the same way this time, Vladeck predicted, with the result that “this case” or one like it “will have to get to the Supreme Court.”

Obviously, it’s anybody’s guess how the high court would then rule. But sustained legal efforts like these will keep the media focus on what the administration is refusing to do in the face of overwhelming public interest in getting to the bottom of this scandal. And it will keep the focus on what the courts are doing.

“The courts can screw around with this, but it would clearly be saying, ‘We don’t care about the law,’” Ornstein told me. “Every time we can shed light on the unwillingness of John Roberts and the Supreme Court to do anything about Trump’s lawlessness, the better off we are, even if it’s far from ideal.”

I’ve argued that there’s real value in efforts like this from the minority. They can be constructive if they impart new information to the public or shine a glaring light on the failure of others in power to impose accountability. As Marcy Wheeler notes, it can also help break through the clutter.

The failure of accountability is everywhere in the Epstein matter. After campaigning on a promise of transparency, the president—with the active assistance of most of the GOP—is thwarting disclosure of untold damning information involving a ring of child predators, information that quite possibly involves some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, including the president himself.

It’s easy to give up on congressional oversight. But Democrats have options for getting very creative. No matter how hopeless it might seem at times, we shouldn’t lose sight of that, lest we do Trump’s (very) dirty work for him. Democrats: Stay on this, and don’t let up.

Greg Sargent

Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.