They Punished Him for Working Across the Aisle
Thomas Massie co-authored a bill lobbyists didn't write. It passed 427–1. Then they spent $32 million to remove him.
Amendment Media | Randy Flagg
Thomas Massie committed a crime against the Washington establishment. He told you what it was himself, on national television.
“I think the biggest crime I committed against the swamp,” the Republican congressman from Kentucky told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday, “was showing the American people that somebody on the right could join somebody on the left and get something done.”
What they got done was the Epstein Files Transparency Act — legislation requiring the Department of Justice to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, co-authored by Massie and Democratic California Representative Ro Khanna. It passed 427–1. Trump signed it in November. And then the establishment went to work.
Last Tuesday, Massie lost his Republican primary to Ed Gallrein — a Trump-backed former Navy SEAL — by nearly ten points. The race drew more than $32 million in advertising spending, most of it funded by donor networks aligned with interests Massie had spent years antagonizing. It was the most expensive congressional primary in 250 years of American history. The message to every other member of Congress was clear: cross the right people and we will spend whatever it takes to remove you.
Ro Khanna was watching. On the same broadcast, the California Democrat described his reaction in two words: “Sadness, disappointment.” He said Massie “was taken out for two reasons. One, he had the courage to go after some very powerful people in working with me to get the Epstein Transparency Act passed. And second, he worked with me to stop this war in Iran. So for taking on the Epstein class and taking on war, he basically lost his seat.”
The Punishment for Effectiveness
Massie himself identified the specific moment his fate was sealed — not his votes against the deficit, not his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill, not even his criticism of the Iran war. It was the Epstein bill.
“That’s probably the only bill that’s passed Washington, D.C., in the last ten years that lobbyists haven’t written,” he told Welker. “It was written by me and Ro Khanna, and we used the pressure of the American people to cross the aisle and get things done. That’s when they decided I had to be taken out, that I was becoming effective.”
Read that again. The bill that ended his career was dangerous to the establishment precisely because ordinary people’s representatives wrote it — not lobbyists. In the current architecture of American politics, that is what makes a congressman worth $32 million to destroy.
Where America Actually Agrees
The political class has spent decades insisting that Americans are hopelessly divided. The polling says otherwise.
On congressional stock trading, support for a ban runs at approximately 85 percent across party lines. A bipartisan discharge petition was gaining real momentum in late 2025 — until House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries quietly steered Democrats away from signing it, instead filing a competing petition designed to include provisions no Republican would ever support. The bill died. Meanwhile, 113 members of Congress made 9,261 trades involving 706 million shares in 2024 alone. Both parties protected the arrangement.
On prescription drug pricing, poll after poll shows Americans across the spectrum want the government to negotiate directly. The underlying mandate — stop letting pharmaceutical companies set prices without any check — commands supermajority support. The industry’s lobbying apparatus has spent years ensuring that support never becomes sufficient legislation.
On paid family leave — twelve weeks for a new parent — support runs at 84 percent nationally. It cannot pass. There is no serious policy disagreement underlying that failure. There is only a donor class that has calculated it is not in their interest to allow it.
The pattern across every one of these issues is identical. Americans agree. Washington doesn’t act. The gap between those two facts is filled, reliably and profitably, by the donor class that funds the campaigns of members who refuse to vote for what their constituents want.
A Different Kind of Bipartisanship
What Massie and Khanna represent is not traditional bipartisanship. Traditional bipartisanship in Washington means both parties agree to give something to their donors. The Massie-Khanna axis is something different: a libertarian-leaning Republican and a progressive Democrat finding common cause not on ideology, but on the specific question of who the government actually serves.
Massie was not a team player. He voted against foreign aid across the board. He voted against the deficit-busting reconciliation bill. He voted against the Iran war authorization. Khanna was not a conventional Democrat either — he co-founded Justice Democrats to build a lane for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money, and called out Jeffries publicly for killing the stock trading ban.
These two represent what a post-culture-war politics might actually look like in practice. Not an ideology. A methodology: identify the interests that have captured the government, build coalitions to confront them regardless of party, and use the pressure of ordinary people to get things done.
The establishment spent $32 million removing one of them from Congress.
What Comes Next
Massie is gone from the House, at least for now. He did not rule out a future run. The voters who backed him in every previous cycle are still there — they weren’t persuaded, they were outspent.
Khanna, speaking on national television about a Republican colleague he called a real friend and a good man, was describing something the American political press does not have adequate language for: a friendship forged not across party lines but beneath them — at the level where the real question isn’t left versus right, but people versus power.
That is the question Amendment Media exists to cover. Thomas Massie paid a significant price for asking it from inside the Republican Party.
The swamp spent $32 million answering him. It hasn’t answered the question.