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Steve Womack voted alongside House Republicans for months to block the release of the Epstein files, burying millions of pages of evidence about a global sex trafficking ring that UN human rights experts say shows credible evidence of crimes against humanity, sexual slavery and torture.
The Justice Department has released about half of the Epstein files a 2025 law ordered out. Every House Democrat and four Republicans backed a petition to force a vote on a follow-up bill. Kansas Rep. Derek Schmidt told a town hall he wouldn't, because he prefers to 'work with the leadership.'
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Members of Congress are paid $174,000 a year.
Two weeks after promising to work 'every day that's on the calendar,' the Speaker canceled the last two weeks of September — then cut the final Thursday too, the day a vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth could have been forced. An Epstein files petition was left short of the 218 signatures it needs. The House has held a recorded vote on 72 of the year's 259 days, and has enacted 110 laws this Congress.
Michigan's Republican Senate nominee argued that people named in the Epstein files need protecting if there's no evidence of a crime. FEC records show seven of them have given more than $4.6 million to his campaign, his committees and the super PAC backing him — $4.5 million of it from Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman.
On September 10, 2025, Marshall voted to table the amendment forcing the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. It failed 51-49. Five months earlier, two Blackstone executives whose names appear in those files gave his campaign $13,000.
Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman gave $3 million to the super PAC boosting Susan Collins' reelection. He appears in the Epstein files. She voted to defeat the amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release them.
House Appropriations roll calls show Hinson absent for all five Epstein votes on September 3 and 10, 2025 — and recorded, both days, on the vote to send the bill to the floor.
Higgins opened his Crowley town hall asking for mutual respect. By the end he had told a constituent he would personally carry him out of the building.