Democrats who spent years ignoring Jeffrey Epstein's Wall Street enablers are now promising subpoenas against JPMorgan the moment they take power in January — raising the question of what took them so long, and who they were protecting in the meantime.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats are preparing to scrutinize JPMorgan's 15-year banking relationship with the late sex offender, according to CNBC, and may haul executives from other Wall Street giants before Congress as well. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the committee's ranking Democrat in line to chair it come January, posted a single word on X after Election Day: "Subpoenas." The committee's Democratic account replied: "Let's f--king go."

The belated tough talk is hard to swallow. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008. JPMorgan didn't drop him until 2013. The bank's own CEO, Jamie Dimon, testified in 2023 that JPMorgan wealth management chief Mary Callahan Erdoes had "full authority to remove Epstein as a client" earlier but failed to do so. Erdoes herself admitted she knew as early as 2006 that Epstein was accused of paying for underage girls to be brought to his home. She kept him on the books anyway.

It gets worse. Just six months after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea, Erdoes emailed former JPMorgan exec Jes Staley — who later admitted to having sex with an Epstein staffer — and asked him to call Epstein for help managing fallout from the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, according to court documents filed by the US Virgin Islands in 2023.

Mimi Liu, co-lead counsel for the US Virgin Islands in that lawsuit, told a federal judge that JPMorgan "was a full-service bank for Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking" and waited to notify the government of suspicious transactions until after Epstein was dead. "This was a CYA reporting after 16 years of all the monies flowing in his JPMorgan accounts after he was dead," Liu said. JPMorgan paid $75 million to settle the suit. The bank has said it regrets its Epstein ties but denies wrongdoing.

So where were Wyden and his committee while all of this was playing out in federal court? Democrats have controlled the Senate since 2021. The Epstein-JPMorgan revelations have been public for years. Now they're reportedly working from a 181-page dossier produced by the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-wing think tank staffed by former aides to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which argues Democrats should broaden their investigative scope beyond the headlines.

Meanwhile, Republicans are racing to use their remaining weeks of unified control to advance debt ceiling reforms, energy permitting changes, and IRS restructuring before January's power flip, according to the Baltimore News. Brandon Arnold of the National Taxpayers Union warned that if the GOP waits, Democrats won't attach the spending restraints that fiscal hawks want. Past debt ceiling deals, Arnold noted, have produced budget caps and balanced budget amendment votes — the kind of leverage that disappears once the other side holds the gavel.

Both parties, then, are playing the same game: wait until you have maximum power, then pretend you've always cared about the thing you ignored when you didn't. The difference is that one side's delay involved a child sex trafficker and the Wall Street bank that kept his money flowing.

The question isn't whether JPMorgan deserves scrutiny. It's why it took a new majority to deliver what the old one wouldn't.