Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky says the House of Representatives will force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II as soon as Congress returns next week, predicting that a discharge petition that has sat two signatures short of the threshold for weeks will finally reach the 218 signatures it needs. The Kentucky Republican made the forecast in a post on X on Thursday 5 November, writing: “When we return next week, we’ll get 218 signatures for Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which guarantees a vote.” The claim, if it holds, would set up the next chapter in one of the most closely watched transparency fights in Congress — a campaign to compel the Justice Department to release files connected to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein that the bill’s supporters say are still being withheld.
Massie’s prediction is exactly that: a forecast, not a result. The petition stood at 216 signatures when he posted, two short of the number required to force the measure out of committee and onto the House floor. The last signature added to the petition is dated 16 September, and nothing has moved since because the House has not been in session. Members can only sign a discharge petition when the House is sitting, which means the count has been frozen in place for nearly two months while Congress was away. The House meets again at noon on Monday 9 November, and that sitting will be the first moment new signatures can be added.
The promise of a vote next week has landed at a moment of unusual political flux in Washington. The midterm elections on Tuesday delivered both chambers of Congress to the Democrats, and the House that returns on Monday is still the outgoing Republican-led one, sitting for a lame-duck session before the new Congress is sworn in on 3 January 2027. Massie’s discharge petition is a procedural device designed for exactly this kind of moment: it allows a majority of House members to bypass a committee that is blocking a bill and force it onto the floor, even when the party leadership would prefer it never came up. The question now is whether the two missing signatures materialise on Monday as Massie predicts, and whether the slow-moving machinery of the discharge process can deliver a vote before the session ends.
The Epstein files have been a persistent source of public and political pressure for years, cutting across party lines in ways that few issues do. The original Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House with just one “no” vote and was signed into law by President Trump in November 2025. But Massie and his allies argue that the law has not produced the disclosure it promised. Massie says the government is still withholding more than three million files, and the new bill — Act II — is designed to close what its sponsors see as the loopholes and delays that have kept those records out of public view. For the survivors of Epstein’s crimes, and for the public that has followed the case for years, the question is whether a second law can succeed where the first one, in their telling, has not.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act II discharge petition: how the count works
The mechanism at the centre of Massie’s prediction is the discharge petition, one of the few tools in the House rulebook that lets an ordinary member force a bill to the floor against the wishes of the leadership. Petition No. 27 was filed by Massie on 31 August to pull H.Res. 1430 — the rule carrying the Epstein Files Transparency Act II — out of the Rules Committee, where it had stalled. A discharge petition needs 218 signatures, a majority of the House, before it can move. Once that threshold is reached, the motion must sit on the Discharge Calendar for seven legislative days before the bill can be brought up for a vote.
That timetable matters, because it means that even if Massie’s forecast is right and the petition reaches 218 signatures on Monday 9 November, there will be no vote at once. The seven-legislative-day waiting period pushes the earliest realistic passage vote to somewhere between 20 November and 1 December, with the first week of December the likeliest window. The calendar is the reason the bill’s supporters have been counting signatures so carefully: every day of delay in reaching 218 pushes the eventual vote further into a lame-duck session that is itself running out of time.
Massie says the two missing signatures are already in hand in all but name. He says two Democrats who were out sick have pledged to sign, which would take the count from 216 to 218 the moment the House reconvenes. That is the basis for his confidence, and it is also the reason the forecast should be treated with care: a pledge is not a signature, and the count does not change until a member physically signs the petition on the House floor. Until the Clerk’s ledger confirms 218, the petition remains two short, and the vote remains a promise rather than a certainty.
The petition’s existing signatories reflect the unusual coalition that has formed around the Epstein files. The bill is co-led by Massie with Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna of California and Teresa Leger Fernández, and the Republicans who have signed include Ralph Norman, Nancy Mace, Brian Fitzpatrick and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It is a cross-party effort in a House that has rarely agreed on anything this year, and that breadth is part of the reason the petition has come as close as it has to the threshold. The two signatures it still needs would, on Massie’s account, come from Democrats returning from illness — a reminder that the arithmetic of the House can turn on the health and attendance of individual members.
The calendar itself has been part of the story. Speaker Johnson shortened the legislative calendar ahead of the midterms, which stalled the vote and left the petition stranded at 216 through the autumn. The House’s absence is the reason the last signature on the petition is dated 16 September: there was simply no session in which a member could add one. The return on Monday is therefore the first real test of Massie’s forecast, and the first chance for the count to move at all in nearly eight weeks.
What Act II would do
The Epstein Files Transparency Act II is built on the argument that the first transparency act, for all its near-unanimous support, has not delivered the disclosure it promised. The original act passed the House with just one dissenting vote and was signed into law by President Trump in November 2025. Yet Massie says more than three million files remain withheld, and Act II is framed as the enforcement mechanism the first law lacked.
Under Act II, survivors of Epstein’s crimes would be able to obtain their own records directly, rather than waiting for the Justice Department to release them on its own timetable. State attorneys general would be empowered to prosecute crimes arising from the files, and Congress would be given the authority to sue the Department of Justice for keeping critical files hidden. The bill is, in other words, less a new disclosure requirement than a set of tools for forcing compliance with the disclosure requirement that already exists.
The design reflects a year of frustration among the bill’s supporters, who say the Justice Department has slow-walked its obligations under the first act. The department’s handling of the files has become a political issue in its own right, and the incoming House Judiciary chair, Jamie Raskin, has said he intends to subpoena the law firms that struck deals with Trump and to investigate Attorney General Todd Blanche for refusing to produce documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That oversight agenda, if it proceeds, would run in parallel with the discharge petition: one track forcing a vote on a new law, the other using the committee’s investigative powers to demand the records the first law was supposed to produce.
For the survivors, the stakes of Act II are practical rather than symbolic. Access to their own records matters for civil cases, for criminal referrals and for the simple fact of knowing what the government holds about crimes committed against them. The bill’s provision letting survivors obtain their records directly is the part of the measure its sponsors talk about most, and it is the part that distinguishes Act II from a purely congressional dispute about executive-branch compliance. The state attorneys general provision matters too: it would open a second front, in state courts, for prosecutions that federal authorities have not brought.
The original act and the files still withheld
The history of the Epstein files in Congress is a history of broad agreement followed by slow implementation. The original Epstein Files Transparency Act was one of the least contested votes of the year, passing the House with a single “no” vote before being signed into law by the president in November 2025. That near-unanimity reflected a rare consensus: that the public was entitled to see the records the government held about Epstein, his associates and the investigations into his crimes.
A year later, that consensus has curdled into a dispute about compliance. Massie’s figure — more than three million files still withheld — is the number at the heart of the Act II campaign, and it is the figure the bill’s supporters cite when they argue that a second law is necessary. The Justice Department has not publicly accepted that characterisation, and the precise count of what has been released and what remains is itself contested. But the political fact is clear enough: the sponsors of the first act believe it has not worked as intended, and they have returned with a stronger measure rather than accepting the status quo.
That public interest is also the reason the discharge petition has attracted such attention. Discharge petitions are usually the preserve of procedural specialists; this one has become a running story in its own right, tracked signature by signature. The count — 216, two short, waiting for the House to return — has taken on a symbolic weight of its own, a measure of how close Congress is to forcing a vote that its leadership has not wanted to hold.
Oversight, the new majority and the January clock
Massie’s forecast arrives in the shadow of a larger change. The Democrats won both chambers in Tuesday’s midterm elections, and the new Congress will be sworn in on 3 January 2027. A Democratic majority in January could pass the transparency act without the procedural workarounds that the discharge petition represents — a straight vote, on the majority’s timetable, without the need to collect 218 signatures one by one. That prospect is one reason some observers have asked whether the discharge petition still matters. The answer, for its supporters, is that it matters because it could deliver a vote weeks earlier, in the lame-duck session, and because it would put every member of the outgoing House on the record before the new Congress takes over.
The incoming Judiciary chair’s plans point in the same direction. Raskin’s stated intention to subpoena the law firms that struck deals with Trump and to investigate the attorney general over the withheld documents signals that the Epstein files will be a central part of the new majority’s oversight agenda. The discharge petition and the oversight plans are complementary: one forces a vote on the law, the other uses the committee’s powers to demand the records. Together they suggest that the files will remain at the centre of congressional politics well into the new year, whether or not the petition reaches 218 on Monday.
There is also a separate Massie initiative that should not be confused with the Epstein vote. Massie has also vowed to force a vote to impeach Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth when the House returns next week. That is a different measure, with a different procedure and a different political logic, and it is covered separately. The Epstein discharge petition stands on its own: a bipartisan, cross-chamber effort to force transparency, with its own count, its own calendar and its own consequences.
The broader context is a lame-duck session in which the outgoing majority’s priorities and the incoming majority’s plans are colliding. The Speaker’s decision to shorten the legislative calendar ahead of the midterms stalled the Epstein vote once already; the calendar for the remainder of the year is short, and the seven-legislative-day waiting period after 218 signatures are reached leaves little room for further delay. If the petition reaches the threshold on Monday, the vote would fall in late November or early December. If it does not, the question passes to the new Congress in January, where the arithmetic is different but the underlying dispute — over files the government has not released — will be exactly the same.
What to watch when the House returns
The first thing to watch on Monday 9 November is the Clerk’s count. The House meets at noon, and the discharge petition will be available for signature from that moment. If the two Democrats Massie has named do sign, the count will move to 218 and the seven-legislative-day clock will start. If they do not — because of illness, absence or a change of mind — the petition will remain two short, and Massie’s forecast will have been wrong. The count is public, and it will be confirmed or contradicted within hours of the House reconvening.
The second thing to watch is the calendar. Once 218 signatures are reached, the motion sits on the Discharge Calendar for seven legislative days, and the earliest realistic passage vote falls between 20 November and 1 December, with the first week of December the likeliest. That window is narrow, and it depends on the House remaining in session through it. Any further shortening of the calendar, or any dispute about what counts as a legislative day, could push the vote later still.
The third thing to watch is what happens in January. A Democratic majority could pass the transparency act without a discharge petition at all, and the new Judiciary chair’s oversight plans suggest the files will be pursued through subpoenas and investigations as well as legislation. The discharge petition is the fastest route to a vote, but it is not the only route to the disclosure its supporters want. The files, and the fight over them, will outlast the lame-duck session either way.
For now, the story is a forecast and a count: 216 signatures, two short, with a promise that Monday will close the gap. Massie has put his name to that promise in public, on the record, and the House’s return will test it. The Epstein files have waited years for full disclosure; the next test of whether that disclosure will come is a matter of days away.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Sayerji/Substack, Heather Cox Richardson (Substack) and True Blue Report.