Rep. Jake Auchincloss

But you stagger different agencies for different time lengths based on insulation from politics versus accountability to the public will.

And Congress is able to take its time on both the authorization, which is the policy,

and the appropriations, which is the money.

And that way we're not every single September in the situation where we've had nine months of posturing followed by six hours of behind the scenes deal making that doesn't produce a great product because it was thrown together at the last minute.

I want to put forward two points on the Epstein issue.

One is

The biggest scandal to me is not what might be in those Epstein files, right?

The biggest scandal to me is that even if the worst of the worst that we are imagining were to come out in the Epstein files, let's imagine, which is not a long stretch to imagine that Donald Trump was just smeared across the Epstein files in a series of very, very compromising positions.

The biggest scandal is that even if that were to become common knowledge, the Republican Party would still cover for him.

A bunch of Republican members of the Congress would walk down the hallways and mumble when reporters asked them questions, and they would say, oh, I didn't see that, or well, I guess that's not really an issue that the American people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

This guy could literally be

a fully compromised pedophile and the Republican Party would still back him.

That tells us all we need to know about how broken the Republican Party is behind Donald Trump and how broken this cult of personality has become for the American public.

Now, if ultimately, I mean, even Marjorie Taylor Greene said the other day,

I don't know Speaker Johnson's machinations.

My hunch is that it actually won't be Speaker Johnson who ends up running obstruction at the last moment for Donald Trump.

It'll actually be Pam Bondi.

As we saw with her recent testimony to Congress, she has fully vacated even the illusion of a Department of Justice that has a firewall with the White House and that is pursuing justice impartially.

It's a fully owned entity of Trump Incorporated.

And my hunch is she'll find some