Dec. 17, 2025, 6:19 p.m.
House Democrats’ maneuver on Wednesday to force a vote on extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies adds to a growing list of instances in which members have harnessed a once-rare procedural tool to bypass Speaker Mike Johnson.
That tool is the discharge petition, designed to give the minority party leverage in a chamber where the majority party dictates absolute control no matter the size of its margin. Traditionally, a petition almost never reaches the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote—especially in today’s divisive political climate, in which lawmakers scarcely defect from their caucuses. But House Republicans’ fraying unity, coupled with a House increasingly willing to defy Johnson, has transformed the legislative gambit into an effective weapon.
In the last month, three petitions garnered the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote, with four Republicans joining the entire Democratic caucus on each one. The current breakdown of the House is 220 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and two vacancies.
Since 1935, only seven motions have been successfully signed into law—and three of those happened within the past year and a half. Rep. Greg Steube of Florida successfully forced a vote on his bill to provide tax relief to victims of natural disasters, which became law in December 2024. Former President Biden also signed legislation in January that expanded Social Security payments for millions of public-sector workers, which was spurred by then-Rep. Garret Graves' discharge petition.
Most recently, President Trump in November signed a bill directing the Justice Department to release the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—legislation brought to his desk in part because four House Republicans backed a discharge petition that forced Johnson to bring a vote to the floor. Another discharge-petition-propelled bill, which would overturn one of Trump’s executive orders and restore union rights for thousands of federal workers, could soon make it to the Oval Office if the Senate passes it (the House voted 231-195 in favor last week).
And earlier this month, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna introduced a discharge petition that would ban members of Congress and their families from owning, buying, or selling individual stocks and other commodities after Johnson stalled a vote on the measure. As of Wednesday, 76 members have signed the petition—15 Republicans and 57 Democrats—though the bill has 116 cosponsors.
Matt Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, described the House’s climate as a “perfect storm” for using discharge petitions. The confluence of pressures between a weak speaker, a slim majority, and a president with sliding poll numbers is creating a rare opening for lawmakers to employ such a tactic.
Historically, the mechanism fails because the minority lacks the raw numbers to bring anything to the floor on its own, Dallek said. But because the GOP holds such a small majority, only four Republicans need to sign on to a petition to force the vote provided every Democrat is on board.
“It's a tool that the minority in the house often tries to wield,” Dallek said. “But it rarely succeeds, because, by definition, if you're in the minority, you don't have enough signatures on the discharge petition to bring it to the floor.”
The health care subsidies and Epstein discharge petitions succeeded each for their own, though similar, reasons. In the case of the Epstein files, the politics offered a rare point of convergence: Republicans and Trump had campaigned on releasing the records, while Democrats saw an opportunity to isolate the opposing party on that promise.
In the case of the health care subsidies, moderate GOP lawmakers worried Johnson's refusal to bring an extension up for a vote—all but ensuring the subsidies would expire—could be a politically perilous issue heading into the midterm elections.
Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, one of the four Republicans who signed onto the discharge petition Wednesday, slammed both Republican and Democratic House leaders’ inaction on extending the Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits after Johnson said he would not allow a vote on legislation that would do so.
“Eleven Republicans have signed onto those discharge petitions,” Lawler said on the floor Tuesday. “Now why is that necessary? Because House Republican leadership will not allow a vote. It is idiotic and shameful.”
Discharge petitions function as a direct challenge to the speaker because they bypass the House’s traditional power structure, noted Ross Baker, a distinguished congressional scholar at Rutgers University.
Baker said that if lawmakers under normal circumstances attempt to force a bill onto the floor against the speaker’s wishes, the speaker signals to the Rules Committee to block it. That gatekeeping power protects committee chairs, whose authority is weakened when a bill is yanked from their jurisdiction. For that reason, Baker said, successful discharge petitions have long been viewed as a sign that the speaker has lost the ability to keep the House’s large, unruly membership in line.
But the recent spate of petitions also reflects a Republican conference that is fractured, he said. He pointed to the GOP caucus’s divisions since the early Trump era, with internal rebellions—including the ouster of then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker—leaving the party in what many members see as a period of transition. With a narrow majority, a speaker cannot reliably prevent the 218th signature from being cast, especially when issues arise that split the conference or give a small bloc of members leverage.
“If you have 218 members willing to overrule the Rules Committee and discharge a bill, you have an insurrection on the part of the rank-and-file members, which is the last thing in the world that any speaker would want to have,” Baker said.
Johnson dismissed the issue on Wednesday, telling CNN that he has not “lost control of the House.” He instead blamed passage of the discharge petitions on what he called “the smallest majority in U.S. history.” (The smallest majority existed from 1917 to 1919, when neither major party held an outright majority and a coalition was formed with third-party members.)
“These are not normal times," Johnson said. "There are processes and procedures in place that are less frequently used when there are larger majorities.”
But, like Dallek, Bradford Fitch, the former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, also tied the spike in successful petitions to Johnson’s inexperienced leadership. Other speakers have operated with margins similarly narrow—most recently then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led a 222-213 House between 2020 and 2022—but did not face the same pattern of procedural end-runs because leadership was successful in enforcing unity.
House Republicans introduced 18 discharge petitions during the 117th Congress (2021-2023), on topics ranging from COVID-19 vaccinations to daylight savings time. None of them received 218 votes and only one—a petition that would have reduced Social Security benefits for individuals who receive other pension benefits—received signatures from two Democrats, who soon afterward withdrew their names from the petition.
Fitch said part of Pelosi’s success arose from her years of experience not only as a member (now serving her 20th term) but as the head of the party. Johnson, on the other hand, had served in Congress for only six and a half years before he was thrust into the chamber’s top position.
“She had more experience as a leader," Fitch said. "Keep in mind she worked her way up in the leadership range—she was whip, she was minority leader before becoming speaker. Mike Johnson had to learn how-to on the job. He's a newer member with less experience.”
