WASHINGTON — Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who sponsored the original Epstein Files Transparency Act, said on Thursday that he is confident he can force a House floor vote on a follow-up bill as soon as Congress returns after the midterm elections. 'When we return next week, we'll get 218 signatures for Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which guarantees a vote,' Massie wrote in a post on Thursday, November 5.
Source: The Hill via Ally Daily
The claim rests on a discharge petition — a rarely used House procedure that bypasses the Speaker and committee leadership if 218 members, a majority of the House, sign it. According to the public ledger kept by the Clerk of the House, Petition No. 27, filed by Massie on August 31 to bring House Resolution 1430 — the rule carrying the Epstein Files Transparency Act II — out of the Rules Committee, stood at 216 names when the House last sat. Two hundred and twelve Democrats had signed, along with four Republicans: Massie himself, Nancy Mace, Ralph Norman and Brian Fitzpatrick, whose signature on September 16 was the last one recorded.
Source: Clerk of the House petition ledger, via Sayer Ji
The two missing names
Nothing has moved since September 16 for a simple procedural reason: members can only sign a discharge petition while the House is in session, and the House has not been in session. Two Democrats who had not signed, John Garamendi of California and Adam Smith of Washington, were ill when the chamber adjourned in September and have said they will sign when it returns, according to reporting on the petition. The House meets again at noon on Monday, November 9 — the first moment the count can change.
Massie says the follow-up bill would do three things the first law, in his account, has not achieved on its own. 'Survivors will be able to get their own records, State Attorneys General can prosecute crimes, and we can take the DOJ to court for keeping critical files hidden,' he wrote. Representative Ro Khanna of California, the Democratic co-sponsor of the original legislation, called the new measure the 'Epstein 2.0 Act' and said it would allow state attorneys general to prosecute those who abused and trafficked young girls.
Reaching 218 does not produce an instant vote. Under House Rule XV the motion must sit on the Discharge Calendar for seven legislative days, then a member must give notice, after which the Speaker must set a time within two legislative days. On the published calendar — the House is scheduled to sit November 9-12 and 16-20 — the earliest realistic passage vote falls between November 20 and December 1, with the first week of December the likeliest window.
The background is the first Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed the House 427-1 in November 2025, passed the Senate and was signed by President Donald Trump that same month. That law forced the Department of Justice to release millions of files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — reporting on the release has put the original disclosure at more than 3.5 million pages, including videos and images. Survivors and other backers have since called for greater transparency, including over redactions in the released files, and for further prosecutions of Epstein's associates. Massie and Khanna argue Epstein had additional co-conspirators who should face criminal charges — an argument the second bill is built to act on by giving survivors, state attorneys general and authorized officials a direct route to sue the Justice Department over alleged unlawful withholding or redactions.
A lame-duck sponsor and a changed House
The politics around the petition have shifted since it was filed. Democrats won majorities in both chambers in the November 3 midterm elections, although the new Congress is not sworn in until January 3, 2027 — so any vote this year happens in a lame-duck House still led by Republicans. Massie himself is in his final weeks in office: he lost his Republican primary after President Trump endorsed his opponent, and his successor takes the seat on January 3. Supporters of the bill say that makes the Republican signatories harder to pressure, because none of them will sit in the next Congress; critics in the administration, including President Trump, have dismissed the push for further disclosure — Trump has called the effort a 'Democrat HOAX' and argued the original transparency law was sufficient, a characterization Massie's bipartisan coalition disputes.
What happens next is a sequence, not a single vote. If Garamendi and Smith sign on Monday, the list freezes at 218, the motion is entered in the Journal and printed in the Congressional Record, and the seven-legislative-day clock starts. After that come up to three roll calls: the motion to discharge, the vote on adopting House Resolution 1430, and then the vote on the bill itself, which carries one hour of debate and no amendments under the rule. A Senate companion bill, S. 5005, introduced by Senators Jeff Merkley and Ben Ray Luján in July, sits in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Senate could also take up a House-passed bill directly, as it did in 2025. If the petition stalls at 216, the sponsors say the incoming Democratic majority can take the measure up again in the new Congress in January — but every pending petition dies with the 119th Congress, so the bill would have to start again from zero.
For readers in the United States, including the Punjabi diaspora families who follow Washington closely through cases involving courts and federal agencies, the story is a live test of how much of a federal record Congress can force into the open when a department says it has already complied. The first check is simple and public: the Clerk's ledger on Monday afternoon will show either 216 or 218 names.