Moving forward

Now that the Massie discharge petition has reached 218 signatures, there's still a rocky road ahead.  The actual demand for the release of the Epstein files must pass the House, which should be easy since it's been widely reported that more than a hundred Republicans will join all the Democrats in voting for it.  Then it will need to come to a vote in the Senate, which Trump will oppose -- but if the level of Republican support is comparable to that in the House, it will happen.  Finally, Trump is very likely to veto it -- but it's not out of the question that the margin of support in both the House and Senate will be large enough to override a veto.

It should be just a matter of listening to their constituents.  The people overwhelmingly want the files released:

Johnson is now saying the House vote will be next week.  Things are moving fast.  The ball could be in the Senate's court in a matter of days.

I think this poster is on to something important:

Elite impunity.  The ultra-wealthy and the politically connected have become a privileged class, exempt from the rules that apply to the rest of us.  Disgust at that situation is probably damn close to unanimous across all of American society, left or right.  Someone has got to take the bull by the horns and bring the parasite class to heel.  If it's one of the political parties that does that, that party will indeed win rewards at the ballot box for a long time.

As I pointed out on Tuesday, it's wrong to view this as just part of the battle over Trump's presidency.  The scale of the scandal is far larger than that.  Yes, if and when all the information is revealed, it's very possible that it will bring Trump down -- while we can't declare him guilty of child sexual abuse unless and until hard evidence is in, his fanatical efforts to keep the files from being released make profound suspicion inevitable.  But if so, he will be one among hundreds.

It's also very wrong to treat this as something titillating.  It's not a "sex scandal" in the ordinary sense.  It's nothing like the routine stories of some congressman having an extramarital affair or an anti-gay fundie firebrand being caught with a male prostitute.  One rightly snickers at the hypocrisy displayed in such cases, but the Epstein scandal is wholly different.  This was a campaign of revolting, perverted, traumatizing physical abuse, committed against more than a thousand children, by rich and powerful men who believed their privilege entitled them to use "lesser" people's children like mere things for their own gratification.  Even many of the FBI agents who had to review the material in the Epstein files were shocked and horrified by what they saw.  It's because of healthy human instinct that child sex abusers are among the most loathed of all criminals, despised even by other criminals in prison, so that they are never safe there.  We know now that hundreds of these filth are entrenched in the upper crust of politics and society, in the US and elsewhere.  They must be exposed, and known to all for who they are and what they have done.