Scott Simon

Bipartisanship in the Senate is one thing, but the politics for House Republicans certainly are different.

Is Speaker Johnson planning a vote on health care?

Well, he certainly faces pressure from some of his swing district Republicans who want some kind of extension, maybe one year on these tax credits.

But the vast majority of House conservatives campaign to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, and they don't want to help extend any part of it.

Speaker Johnson is blaming Democrats for the rising costs of health care.

He says when they put the system into place, he claims that House Republicans has what he says volumes of ideas on reducing costs, but we haven't seen any actual details.

And based on what he said this week, he doesn't sound like this is something the House is going to move quickly on.

The Republicans would demand a lot of reforms before anything like that was ever possible.

And we have to go through that deliberative process.

And of course, the speaker has other things to deal with.

Preeminently right now, a vote to force the release of documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

How do we expect that to play out?

Right.

This issue was forced on the speaker and we expected a vote in the House in early December.

But with increasing calls from Republicans to get these files out, the speaker decided to move that up.

And there's going to be a vote this week.

The politics on this are really bad for the speaker and the Republican Party in the White House.

The party's divided.

And this bill is even picking up more and more Republican votes each day, even as top Trump officials were pressuring Republican lawmakers to even block a bill from coming up in the House.

The speaker argues the House Oversight Committee has already been investigating Epstein.