The legislation, which the Senate passed Monday night, is expected to narrowly pass the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. House Democrats are largely anticipated to oppose the deal, which does not include a core demand: an extension to Affordable Care Act healthcare tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he believes the deal is poised to pass by the end of the day.

“We believe the long national nightmare will be over tonight,” Johnson told reporters in Washington. “It was completely and utterly foolish and pointless.”

House Democrats were scheduled to meet ahead of the floor vote to discuss their vote. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday night that there is a “strong expectation” that Democrats will be “strongly opposed” to the shutdown deal when it comes to final vote.

If the tax credits lapse, premiums will more than double on average for more than 20 million Americans who use the healthcare marketplace, according to independent analysts at the research firm KFF.

The spending bill, if approved, will fund the government through Jan. 30 and reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown. It will also guarantee back pay for federal employees who were furloughed or who were working without pay during the budget impasse.

Passage of the bill would mark a crucial moment on the 43rd day of the shutdown, which left thousands of federal workers without pay, millions of Americans uncertain on whether they would receive food assistance and travelers facing delays at airports across the country.

A vote is expected to begin after 4 p.m. EST — after Johnson swears in Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who was elected seven weeks ago. Once sworn in, Grijalva is set to become the final vote needed to force a floor vote on a petition demanding the Trump administration release files connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

The swearing-in ceremony will soon lay the groundwork for a House vote that Trump has long tried to avoid. It would come as the Epstein saga was reignited on Wednesday morning when Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new emails in which the late sex trafficker said Trump “knew about the girls” that he was victimizing.

The emails are part of a trove of documents from Epstein’s estate released to the committee.

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Zamora, a 36-year-old Army veteran, has nothing good to say.

“The laws. All the rights taken away from women. The stuff with ICE,” Zamora said, ticking off her frustrations as she stopped outside the post office in the Central Valley community of Los Banos. “Why are they going after people working on farms when they’re supposed to be chasing violent criminals?”

Medeiros, by contrast, is delighted Trump replaced Joe Biden. “He wasn’t mentally fit,” Medeiros said of the elderly ex-president. “There was something wrong with him from the very beginning.”

Despite all that, the two do share one belief: Both say the government should cough up every last bit of information it has on Jeffrey Epstein, his sordid misdeeds and the powerful associates who moved in his aberrant orbit.

Trump “did his whole campaign on releasing the Epstein files,” Zamora said. “And now he’s trying to change the subject. ‘Oh, it’s a ‘hoax’ … ‘Oh, you guys are still talking about that creep?’ And yet there’s pictures throughout the years of him with that creep.”

Medeiros, 56, echoed the sentiment.

Trump and his fellow Republicans “put themselves into this predicament because they kept talking constantly” about the urgency of unsealing records in Epstein’s sex-trafficking case — until they took control of the Justice Department and the rest of Washington. “Now,” she said, “they’re backpedaling.”

Medeiros paused outside the engineering firm where she works in the Central Valley, in Newman, on a tree-lined street adorned with star-spangled banners honoring local servicemen and women.

“Obviously there were minors involved” in Epstein’s crimes, she said, and if Trump is somehow implicated “then he needs to go down as well.”

Years after being found dead in a Manhattan prison cell — killed by his own hand, according to authorities — Epstein appears to have done the near-impossible in this deeply riven nation. He’s united Democrats, Republicans and independents around a call to reveal, once and for all, everything that’s known about his case.

“He’s dead now, but if people were involved they should be prosecuted,” said Joe Toscano, a 69-year-old Los Banos retiree and unaffiliated voter who last year supported Trump’s return to the White House. “Bring it all out there. Make it public.”

California’s 13th Congressional District, where Zamora, Medeiros and Toscano all live, is arguably the most closely fought political terrain in America. Sprawling through California’s midriff, from the far reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area to the southern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, it’s farm country: flat, fertile and crossed-hatched with canals, rail lines and thruways with utilitarian names such as Road No. 32 and Avenue 18½.

The myriad small towns are brief interludes amid the dairy and poultry farms and lush carpeting of vegetables, fruit and nut trees that stretch to the hazy-brown horizon. The most populous city, Merced, has fewer than 100,000 residents. (Modesto, with a population of around 220,000, is split between the 5th and 13th districts.)

Democratic Rep. Adam Gray was elected in November in the closest House race in the country, beating the Republican incumbent, John Duarte, by 187 votes out of nearly 211,000 cast. The squeaker was a rematch and nearly a rerun. Two years prior, Duarte defeated Gray by fewer than 600 votes out of nearly 134,000 cast.

Not surprisingly, both parties have made the 13th District a top target in 2026; handicappers rate the contest a toss-up, even as the field sorts itself out. (Duarte has said he would not run again.)

The midterm election is a long way off, so it’s impossible to say how the Epstein controversy will play out politically. But there is, at the least, a baseline expectation of transparency, a view that was repeatedly expressed in conversations with three dozen voters across the district.

Zachery Ramos, a 25-year-old independent, is the founder of the Gustine Traveling Library, which promotes learning and literacy throughout the Central Valley. Its storefront, painted with polka dots and decorated with giant butterflies, sits like a cheery oasis in Gustine’s four-block downtown, a riot of green spilling from the planter boxes out front.

Inside, the walls were filled with commendations and newspaper clippings celebrating Ramos’ good works. As a nonprofit, he said, “we have to have everything out there. All the books. Everything.”

Epstein, he suggested, should be treated no differently.

“When it comes to something as serious as that, with what may or may not have taken place on his private island, with his girlfriend” — convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell — “I do think it should all be out in the open,” Ramos said. “If you’re not afraid of your name being in [the files], especially when you’re dealing with minors being assaulted, it should 100% be made public.”

Ed, a 42-year-old Democrat who manages a warehouse operation in Patterson, noted that Trump released the government’s long-secret files on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., even though King’s family objected. (Like several of those interviewed, he declined to give his last name, to avoid being hassled by readers who don’t like what he had to say.)

Why, Ed wondered, shouldn’t the Epstein files come to light? “It wasn’t just Trump,” he said. “It was a lot of Republicans in Congress that said, ‘Hey, we want to get these files out there.’ And I believe if Kamala [Harris] had won, they would be beating her down, demanding she do so.”

He smacked a fist in his palm, to emphasize the point.

Sue, a Madera Republican and no fan of Trump, expressed her feelings in staccato bursts of fury.

“Apparently the women years ago said who was doing what, but nobody listens to the women,” said the 75-year-old retiree. “Release it all! Absolutely! You play, you pay, buddy.”

Even those who dismissed the importance of Epstein and his crimes said the government should hold nothing back — if only to erase doubts and lay the issue to rest.

Epstein “is gone and I don’t really care if they release the files or not,” said Diane Nunes, a 74-year-old Republican who keeps the books for her family farm, which lies halfway between Los Banos and Gustine. “But they probably should, because a lot of people are waiting for that.”

Patrick, a construction contractor, was more worked up about “pretty boy” Gavin Newsom and “Nazi Pelosi” — “yes, that’s what I call her” — than anything that might be lurking in the Epstein files. “When the cat is dead, you don’t pick it up and pet it. Right?” He motioned to the pavement, baking as the temperature in Patterson climbed into the low 90s.

“It’s over with,” the 61-year-old Republican said of Epstein and his villainy. “Move on.”

At least, that would be his preference. But to “shut everybody up, absolutely, yeah, they should release them,” Patrick said. “Otherwise, we’re all going to be speculating forever.”

Or at least until the polls close in November 2026.

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The tremendous uproar against the Justice Department and FBI has crossed partisan lines; if anything, it has been many conservative commentators and some Republican elected officials who have expressed the most outrage, with accusations and implications that the government is hiding something about the case to protect powerful individuals.

Given the sordid nature of the underlying subject matter and the fact the feds closely examined “over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography,” the obsession with the “Epstein files” gives off a vibe that is, frankly, somewhat creepy. To be sure, it is always righteous to seek justice for victims, but many don’t want public scrutiny.

The Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files has not been its finest hour. During a February interview on Fox News, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said, in response to host John Roberts’ question about whether the Justice Department would release a “list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,” that the list was “sitting on [her] desk right now to review.” It is an astonishing about-face for Bondi to now disavow that investigators have any such list. The Trump administration owes us all a clear explanation.

With that large caveat aside, though, the fact remains: This is just not the biggest deal in the world — and if you think it is, then you probably need to log off social media.

The midterm elections next fall are not going to be determined by the existence — or absence — of a “client list” for an extravagantly wealthy dead pedophile. Nor will they be decided on the absurd grounds of whether FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have somehow been “compromised.” (They haven’t.) Instead, the election — and our politics — will be contested on typical substantive grounds: the economy, inflation, immigration, crime, global stability and so forth. This is as it should be. There are simply better uses of your time than fuming over the government’s avowed nonexistence of the much-ballyhooed client list.

You might, for instance, consider spending more time, during these midsummer weeks, with your family. Maybe you can take the kids camping or fishing. Maybe you can take them to an amusement park or to one of America’s many national park treasures. You can spend less time scrolling Instagram and TikTok and more time reading a good old-fashioned book; you will learn more, you will be happier and you will be considerably less likely to traffic in fringe issues and bizarre rhetoric that alienates far more than it unifies.

Instead of finding meaning in the confirmation biases and groupthink validations of social media algorithms, perhaps you can locate meaning where countless human beings have found it since time immemorial: religion. Spend more time praying, reading scripture and attending services at your preferred house of worship. All of these uses of your time will fill you with a sense of stability, meaning and purpose that you will never find deep in the bowels of an X thread on the Epstein files.

Too many people today who are deeply engaged in America’s combustible political process have forgotten that there are more important things in life than politics. And even within the specific realm of politics, there are plenty of things that are more deserving of attention and emotional investment than others. Above all, it is conservatives — those oriented toward sobriety and humility, not utopianism and decadence — who ought to be able to properly contextualize America’s political tug-of-war within our broader lives and who ought to then be able to focus on the meaningful political issues to the exclusion of tawdry soap opera drama.

Like many others, I expect that the Justice Department’s recent — and seemingly definitive — waving away of the Epstein files saga will not actually prove to be the final word on the matter. To the limited extent that I allow myself to think about this sideshow, I hope that the administration does squarely address the many legitimate and unanswered questions now being asked by a frustrated citizenry that has seemingly been misled by the Trump administration, either in Bondi’s February statement or in this month’s report. But I also hope that the extent of this past week’s rage might serve as an edifying moment. Let’s return to the real things in life and focus on what matters most.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

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