The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Another government shutdown. The U.S. military shooting down a boat. The Centers for Disease Control is in turmoil just ahead of flu season. And where in the world will the National Guard go next?

This is the world Congress returned to this week. If your head is spinning, you’re not the only one. This week on The Intercept Briefing, we break it all down with host Akela Lacy and politics reporters Jessica Washington and Matt Sledge.

“The biggest thing hanging over everybody is this looming shutdown,” says Sledge. Congress needs to negotiate a budget extension before a potential October 1 shutdown. And, as Sledge notes, there are a handful of expected fights this session that could hamstring Congress. “There are a million other things happening on Capitol Hill. There's a big defense bill working its way through the House and Senate. And then there’s this whole Epstein situation,” he says, “which threatens to derail everything else.”

On Wednesday morning, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-KY, and Ro Khanna, D-CA, held a press conference with Epstein’s victims, where they announced a bill to force a vote to release the full Department of Justice investigation into the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“Democrats are saying, well, this is something we should do regardless, it is very clearly also a political issue in the sense that Trump has a real weakness with his base,” says Washington. “Democrats perhaps were slow to understand how much of a political liability this was for Trump. But they’re waking up, and this does very clearly seem to be an issue that is, if not partisan — obviously we're seeing Republicans join in as well — deeply political in nature.”

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Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It's an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”

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The Democratic Party has lost millions of voters since 2020, according to new analysis from the New York Times. Meanwhile, Republicans are gaining ground, even in traditional blue states, as more voters register with the GOP.

“We're missing layups on the basics right now,” says longtime Democratic strategist Nina Smith, alarmed by the news. “We're losing on voter registration in 30 states — the only 30 states that track voter registration between parties. We're losing in every single one.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Smith, a former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams with more than two decades in Democratic politics, joined host Jessica Washington to explain why the party keeps failing at the fundamentals — like voter registration, building the base, and party infrastructure — while Donald Trump consolidates power despite record-high disapproval ratings.

“Voter registration is like the layup of Democratic basketball politics,” says Smith. “How do we expect to win elections if we're not registering voters who are committed to us on our issues?”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference.

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