Attention, Mike Johnson

     Yes, Mike, you're Speaker of the House.  Bear in mind that it is not the senior legislative body.

     Speaker Johnson had opined that the U. S. Senate should "fix" undefined shortcomings in the House bill to release the Epstein files that made it to the floor over his efforts to stop it.  The Senate took note -- and unanimously voted to approve the measure exactly as passed by the House.  Which it was, and there you go.

     The House and Senate aren't supposed to be telling one another what to do -- and the Senate in particular is touchy about its prerogatives.  They are, after all, the more august collection of legislators (though these days, picking "white" as the natural hair color of any member of Congress will win handily on percentages), and they never lose sight of that.  Ancient Rome had a Senate, after all, and our Senators get pretty sure they were born to the purple.

     I'll give the Speaker credit for one thing, though: he sure doesn't know when he's whupped.

     By and by -- the Department of Justice has thirty days to let their fingers do the walking and they may take every one of them -- there will be plenty of people sieving through the Epstein files slime, looking to see what kind of dirt they can get and who they can get it on.  My guess is there won't be many surprises, and it will be a series of small icks in the face of the greater awfulness of the whole scheme; True Believers will be able to maintain their happy illusions and the Truly Appalled will find plenty of awful things to point at.  Hey, remember when politics was a little less like a tour of the sewers?

     The French occasionally shove huge spheres through the main drains in Paris, pushing all the big, nasty chunks to the outflow where they can be safely removed.  We get the chance to do so in Washington, DC every even-numbered year, and too often we decide to just leave it all where it fell.