“Daily Show” correspondent Ronny Chieng was stunned on Wednesday by how fast the House passed a bill to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and predicted that the Senate would have a “plan to drag this thing out.”
However, the Senate unanimously approved the bill despite House Speaker Mike Johnson’s expectation that the upper chamber would amend it, an effort that would’ve seen the bill returned to the House.
Moments after celebrating the Senate as a place where “legislation and senators go to die,” Chieng appeared stunned by the bill’s swift passage.
“Wait what? Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on — wait, how — how the fuck did it pass this fast?! I thought a bill in the Senate had to go through amendments and committees and floor votes and Mitch McConnell’s neck folds,” he quipped. “And they have to add some unrelated earmarks that somehow make Lindsey Graham millions of dollars. Like, how did they get around all that?”
Chieng then showed an MS NOW clip highlighting how Senate Democrats had pressured Republicans to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act by “unanimous consent,” a process where the Senate accepts the House’s version of the bill as it stands.
“Wait, you can do that? Unanimous consent? Well then, why don’t you do that with every bill?” Chieng asked. “I mean, does it only work on bills with Epstein’s name? In that case, we might need to pass the Jeffrey Epstein Universal Healthcare Epstein Act Featuring Jeffrey Epstein!”
Watch more of Chieng’s Wednesday monologue on “The Daily Show.”