Michael Barbaro

They're what my colleague calls the Epstein class.

Rich, elite, connected individuals who always have thought they're above the law and if they ever get in trouble, they'll just buy a politician.

And in my district, they're trying to buy a politician.

To the degree that this has become a political story versus what you've always seemed to want it to be, which is a story of victims and documents becoming public, it feels like it's become the story of you all making an end run around the president when he fought this.

And Congress, in a very real sense, rebalancing power that it has ceded over the past year to Trump and to the executive branch.

Is that how you see this?

Is this an overdue correction?

It is an overdue correction.

Of power balance?

But, you know, it's the House that has ceded the authority to the president.

The president didn't come and... Your house, your party.

Yeah, Speaker Johnson.

The president isn't acting outside of the Constitution.

He is getting the Congress to do nothing in the face of what he does.

And I wouldn't say this is a victory for the Speaker of the House,

Because he has been fine with doing whatever the president wants to do.

So who's it a victory for?

It's a victory for the people who exerted enough pressure on the members of Congress that I think they went to the speaker and to the president and said, we can't do this.

You can't make us vote against victims of sex trafficking.

And ultimately, the president and the speaker can do math.