The discharge petition is a way to force votes by sidestepping the Speaker. For decades it was mostly forgotten, but has been brought back for bills on the Epstein files and to extend ACA subsidies.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Here in Washington, Congress is back this week, and one of the first tasks for the House of Representatives is a vote – a vote on a bill to renew now-expired health insurance subsidies, despite objections from Speaker Mike Johnson. Now, this is not the first time this – in this Congress that enough Republicans have joined with Democrats to circumvent the speaker using a previously obscure maneuver called a discharge petition. NPR congressional reporter Sam Gringlas explains.
SAM GRINGLAS, BYLINE: Speaker Johnson for weeks refused to allow a vote to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, even as more than a dozen members of his caucus pressed for action before they expired at the end of December. Some of those Republicans, like Congressman Mike Lawler of New York, were fuming.
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MICHAEL LAWLER: It is idiotic and shameful. This place is disgraceful. Everybody wants the political advantage. They don’t actually want to do the damn work.
GRINGLAS: So just before Congress left town for the holidays, Lawler and three other swing district Republicans joined with Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension. The method, a discharge petition, which allows 218 or more members to sidestep the speaker and force a vote in the House. The subsidies would still have to pass the Senate, which already voted down a three-year extension. But Lawler told NPR that for him, the petition was a last resort to recharge negotiations.
LAWLER: I don’t want to go down this road, but unfortunately, we were left with no alternative after we exhausted every other option.
GRINGLAS: Use of the discharge petition is surging. In the fall, five Republicans joined with Democrats to compel a vote overturning President Trump’s order ending collective bargaining rights for many federal workers. A discharge petition also forced a vote mandating the Trump administration release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
MOLLY REYNOLDS: The last time we had a Congress that had this much success with the discharge petition, oh, it was 90 years ago.
GRINGLAS: That was during the Great Depression, says Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution. The tool originated two decades earlier as rank-and-file members struggled to push back on then-speaker Joseph Cannon.
REYNOLDS: Sometimes referred to as Czar Cannon, to give you a sense of how members felt about the amount of power he was trying to exercise.
GRINGLAS: But unlike those members more than a century ago, lawmakers today see Johnson less as an iron-fisted ruler and more as a speaker missing in action. In announcing her exit from Congress, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene slammed Johnson for letting bills by the rank and file collect dust and keeping the House out for the entire 43-day shutdown.
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MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: The legislature has been mostly sidelined. And we are entering campaign season, which means all courage leaves and only safe campaign reelection mode is turned on in the House of Representatives.
GRINGLAS: The willingness of some Republicans to buck their speaker has also given Democrats unusual sway to force votes advancing their own agenda. Johnson has brushed off the flurry of successful discharge petitions as unavoidable when it only takes a few defections.
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MIKE JOHNSON: This is not a challenge to the speaker’s leadership. Here’s the reality, everybody. We have a razor-thin majority – a record small majority.
GRINGLAS: Johnson spoke to reporters in December.
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JOHNSON: It’s not an act of defiance. Every member has a different district with different dynamics and different demographics.
GRINGLAS: But Mike Ricci, who served as a top staffer under former Republican speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, says there’s more to the story.
MIKE RICCI: If members don’t trust the speaker, they don’t feel like the speaker has their back, there’s no question this is a direct referendum on the speaker himself.
GRINGLAS: Ricci says both Boehner and Ryan sometimes struggled to wrangle unwieldy Republican caucuses.
RICCI: It was unruly, but it was not unproductive. With enough talking, with enough back and forth, we could figure out a path forward to keep the House moving.
GRINGLAS: In this era, some members now see the discharge petition as the tool to keep the House moving. And with a growing track record of success, more may be on the way.
Sam Gringlas, NPR News, Washington.
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