"He's One of a Dying Breed in Congress. America Needs Him Now More Than Ever" -- Thomas Massie is worth a closer look.

[ancianita]

https://archive.ph/rMeK4

"... “I’m on the Judiciary Committee because I know about patents,” he told me. “Not because I’m a lawyer — because I’m not a lawyer.” He is there, he says, to represent “small tech and garage inventors.”
Once Mr. Massie locks in on the technical details of a topic, it’s hard to shake him out of it, a common trait in an engineer and an unusual one in a politician. “In electrical engineering, if you have a circuit board,” he said, “if it’s got a thousand wires in it, and one of them’s not connected, then the whole board is junk.” That focus, he added, is “how we get the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed.”

The Epstein files were the fight that transformed Mr. Massie from one of Mr. Trump’s occasional Republican irritants into a declared enemy. The issue brought together several things Mr. Trump hates: a Republican acting independently; a procedural maneuver the White House could not easily control; and a persistently troubling topic MAGA had promised to resolve before suddenly deciding there was not much to see.

... the Trump administration released binders that seemed to him to contain nothing much at all. Why are they going to these lengths to pretend they’d released something they hadn’t? he wondered. The question stayed with him. So did the testimony of Epstein survivors. It “was like a level of evil I hadn’t even contemplated,” he told me.

Mr. Massie reshaped his legislative priorities accordingly — and bent his considerable technical skills to a moral crusade. He and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, pursued a discharge petition not on a bill, he explained, but on a rule. He had served on the Rules Committee, and knew the power it held. The maneuver put them, and Congress, on the road to requiring the Justice Department to release the files. A century from now, he said, if the Justice Department finds something with Mr. Epstein’s name on it, “they have 30 days to release it in a public searchable format.” That, he said, is “the cool thing about it.”

This desire for lasting transparency is also why he votes no so often. Mr. Massie has frequently been the lone no vote on sanctions, foreign-policy resolutions and symbolic condemnations that most members would rather pass quickly and forget...
His theory is that the lone no vote forces everyone to ask what was in the bill or resolution, or ask questions about, say, spending, as in Mr. Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill. He was one of two House Republicans to vote against it...."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/opinion/thomas-massie-trump-republicans.html