Updated January 7, 2026 at 5:00 AM EST
The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on a measure to renew now-expired Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies — over the objection of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
It is not the first time this Congress that enough Republicans have joined with Democrats to circumvent the speaker using an obscure maneuver called a discharge petition.
Seldom-deployed in recent decades, the discharge petition is now seeing a surge in use and success. The legislative tool allows 218 or more rank-and-file members to sidestep the speaker and force a vote.
Since 2023, the year Johnson became speaker, seven discharge petitions have reached the 218 threshold, the same number as in the previous four decades.
As more than a dozen members of his own caucus pressed for action before the enhanced subsidies expired at the end of December, Johnson refused to allow even a vote.
Some of those Republicans, like Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, fumed.
"It is idiotic and shameful," Lawler said on the House floor. "This place is disgraceful. Everybody wants the political advantage. They don't actually want to do the damn work."
So just before Congress left town for the holiday recess, Lawler and three other swing-district Republicans signed onto a discharge petition by Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension.
That extension would still have to pass the Senate, which already voted down a three-year renewal in December. But Lawler called the discharge petition a last resort to recharge negotiations.
"I didn't want to go down this road," Lawler told NPR in December. "But unfortunately we were left with no alternative after we exhausted every other option."
That was just weeks after five Republicans joined with Democrats to compel a vote overturning President Trump's executive order ending collective bargaining rights for many federal workers.
A discharge petition also forced a vote compelling the Trump administration to release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
History of the discharge petition
The discharge petition played a role in advancing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2002 and the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank in 2015.
But for the most part, the tool was not used extensively until very recently.
"The last time we had a Congress that had this much success with the discharge petition, it was 90 years ago," says Molly Reynolds, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution.
That was during the Great Depression, as members tried to advance their own legislation despite leadership trying to keep the chamber focused on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda.
The discharge petition originated two decades earlier in 1910, when rank-and-file members struggled to push back on then-Speaker Joseph Cannon.
"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," Reynolds said.
But unlike those members of more than a century ago, lawmakers today see Johnson less as an iron-fisted ruler and more as a speaker missing in action.
What the surge reveals about the current Congress
In announcing her exit from Congress, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia slammed Johnson for letting bills by the rank-and-file collect dust and keeping the House out for the entirety of the record-long 43-day government shutdown.
"With almost one year into our majority, 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," Greene said at the time.
Later, Greene mused about supporting any discharge petition, even for policies she disagrees with.
This willingness of some Republicans to buck their speaker has also given Democrats unusual sway to force votes that are uncomfortable for Republicans or advance their own agenda.
Johnson has brushed off the flurry of successful discharge petitions as unavoidable, saying any speaker would struggle to keep the caucus unified when just a few defectors is enough to force action. In 2023, a handful of insurgent Republicans linked up with Democrats to oust Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
"This is not a challenge to the speaker's leadership," Johnson told reporters in December. "Here's the reality everybody. We have a razor-thin majority, a record small majority."
Johnson says the House has been productive under his leadership, pushing through the sweeping Republican tax and spending legislation known as the "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act.
He told reporters that he essentially must maintain unanimity – which is extremely difficult in a Republican caucus of more than 200 people.
"It's not an act of defiance," he said of the four GOP members who signed the health discharge petition. "I understand that every member has a different district with different dynamics and different demographics."
Top Republican leaders in the House have told reporters in recent days they are weighing changes to House rules that would make it more difficult to force votes with a discharge petition.
A referendum on the speaker?
Some of the four Republicans who helped force the subsidies vote have downplayed the extent to which the discharge petitions are a reflection on Johnson.
"My frustration isn't about him or the way he's doing the job," Lawler told NPR. "My frustration is we have an issue that needs to be addressed and we ran out of options to do it."
But Mike Ricci, who served as a top staffer under the former Republican speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, says that while a slim majority would make life more difficult for any speaker, that is not the whole story. He says it is clear that many members do not trust the speaker or feel he has their back.
"There is no question this is a direct referendum on the speaker himself," Ricci said.
Ricci says Boehner and Ryan both sometimes struggled to wrangle unwieldy Republican caucuses, especially amid the rise of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus.
"It was unruly, but not unproductive," he said. "With enough talking, with enough back and forth, we could figure out a path forward to keep the House moving."
In this era, some members now see the discharge petition as the tool of choice to keep the House moving in the direction they want to see.
"When you have a hammer, everything you see is a nail," Reynolds said. "When you have a problem, maybe everything you see as a solution is a discharge petition? So it wouldn't shock me if we see more before Congress is out."
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