Mike Johnson, Speaker Irrelevant
The atrophied chamber is moving legislation without GOP leadership’s blessing.
Diss track
Call it a holiday miracle if you must. But the last days of 2025 have seen multiple instances of bipartisan cooperation in the House.
And it’s not just cases of well-adjusted moderates and party brass making difficult compromises to avoid a catastrophe. Instead, what we’ve seen is aggressive procedural rules-gaming by a variety of members to circumvent House leadership through the use of discharge petitions.
The increasing frequency of these end-runs around leadership is a forceful demonstration of just how sick and tired rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are of trying to work in a chamber run by an obsequious speaker who sees his role as doing the bidding of a power-hungry White House.
To understand how big a middle finger the discharge petitions are to Mike Johnson, you first must understand that they were vanishingly rare before the current Congress. The maneuver, which allows a bill to move out of committee and on to the floor with the signature of 218 House members, has been successful just twice since the beginning of the 21st century. Since 1935, less than four percent of discharge petitions garnered enough signatures to even receive a vote. In the modern era, discharge petitions have typically come from swing-district members of the majority banding with the minority. But already this year, one has been successful and we could see a few more passed in the weeks, months, or year ahead.
“They’re always supposed to be an option of last resort,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told me. “Typically they’re a tool of the minority, but you’re seeing it happen in the majority a lot more.”
Fitzpatrick has an active discharge petition of his own to advance a wide-ranging bill filled with tax provisions, and he said more are on the way.
“I’ve filed several,” he said. “I have a shell that I’m gonna use for Russia sanctions, I did this one with [Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine)] on collective bargaining, I’ve discharged the Let America Vote Act, which is independents voting in primaries, I’ve discharged [a bill] preserving the filibuster—I’ve done a lot.”
“But I really wish these bills would just come to the floor on their own,” Fitzpatrick added. “It shouldn’t take a discharge petition. Leadership should be putting these bills on the floor when there’s that much support for it. A discharge is really forcing rank-and-file members to take matters into their own hands.”
Before this year, discharge petitions succeeded so rarely that they weren’t even taken to be a viable option. They typically gain a few signatures from lawmakers in the minority party and then sit in limbo until their eventual expiration. But since late summer, several discharge petitions have gained broader support from lawmakers and generated large amounts of public interest in the process.
So far, at least two have garnered the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote: a bill to restore the collective bargaining rights for federal workers, and the fall’s biggest driver of the legislative news cycle: Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) Epstein files bill. Both petitions passed on the strength of combined Republican and Democratic support, but the aisle-crossers for each came from markedly different coalitions. The Epstein bill got over the finish line thanks to far-right members—especially dissident Republican women—holding their ground against Trump, while the collective-bargaining bill passed thanks to GOP moderates allying with Democrats.
Now the House hopper is filling up with additional discharge petitions. One would force a vote on banning stock trading for members of Congress. Led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), it currently has 67 signatures. Some Democrats haven’t signed on because they remain opposed to it, while others are holding off because they want additional restrictions for officials in the executive branch. Coincidentally, just a few days after I asked Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) about his conspicuous purchase of Netflix stock shortly before the company announced its bid to acquire Warner Bros., Fields signed Luna’s discharge petition to ban such transactions by lawmakers.
A Ukraine aid discharge petition has 215 signatures, including that of Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.); just three more will be sufficient to force a vote. A Democratic-led proposal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years could also be garnering GOP support as Speaker Johnson attempts to control the health care agenda without input from his colleagues. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), railed against Johnson’s refusal to play ball Tuesday morning while plugging his own discharge petition on a one-year extension of ACA subsidies.
“Because House Republican leadership will not allow a vote,” Lawler said in a floor speech. “It is idiotic and shameful.”
Lawler then pleaded with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to back his petition to stick it to Johnson. “Come down to this floor, sign the discharge, and show real leadership,” Lawler said, “because, sadly, my conference has failed to do that.”
By their very nature, discharge petitions are acts of defiance. If Johnson truly wanted to, he could make it less likely that they’d be used by simply allowing normal votes on the pieces of legislation in question; if he takes issue with how they’ve been written, he could invite similar bills advocating the same priorities with more palatable language.
But Republicans are still beholden to their “Hastert Rule,” which provides that only bills with support from the “majority of the majority” ever see the floor. While many in the party would be eager to operate according to that broad principle, Johnson has narrowed the window of viability by prioritizing the agenda of the White House and GOP leadership while leaving the concerns of the rank-and-file unaddressed. So a simple majority of the chamber is taking it upon themselves to get their desired votes.
Capitol Hill staffers I’ve spoken to on both sides of the aisle are predicting that more discharge petitions will make it to the floor in the coming months. And Republicans’ potential attendance problems in the new year—many will be away campaigning, either to keep their seats or make the jump to new positions—could make it harder to stop the rebel lawmakers from emerging victorious. Provided they can get some of their Democratic colleagues on board with their proposals, dissident Republicans should have an easy path to getting votes on their priorities, whether Johnson wants it or not.
Very based, sir.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), alias Based Mike Lee, has done his best to avoid learning any lessons this year. Although he received a sharp dressing-down from a colleague for blithely scoring points on the victims of a political assassination over the summer, Lee stayed his course as a poster, credulously sharing AI-generated images and firing off posts and replies all through Labor Day weekend. It’s part of a larger problem for Lee.
After news broke that a gunman had murdered Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia, Lee logged on Sunday evening to indulge his atrocious habit. The horrific attack was not an occasion to immediately offer prayers or words of support—at least not for him. He instead took it as just another content opportunity, a chance to do some good, old-fashioned trolling.
He’s reposted his own words several times since.
His position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee notwithstanding, Lee also went after the Australian Prime Minister: “The entire English-speaking world seems obsessed with blaming . . . the English-speaking world for violence originating elsewhere,” he wrote.
Lee started posting these low-effort gibes around 8 p.m. Eastern, and he kept at it for hours. Around 1 a.m., almost as an aside, Lee condemned left-wing accounts for mocking the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Sanctimony for thee, but not for Lee.
Lee also spent the weekend posting about Sweden’s alleged descent into civil violence, amplifying a post about “no-go zones” in that country. He also approvingly reposted a video in which a man called carbon dioxide “the gas of life” and claimed that human-caused climate change isn’t a real problem. All very cool, chill, and normal stuff, for a right-wing iPad kid.
As with Trump, it’s tempting to brush aside unstable and debased behavior when it occurs so frequently. But Lee’s internet habit is a problem. Utah’s voters might be starting to wonder if iPad kid-ism is what they want from their elected representatives.
Bad habit
The Trump administration is on a collision course with the Catholic Church, and a Texas nun might be one of the first points of impact. Christopher Hale writes:
Over the past year, the Trump-Vance White House has ratcheted up a campaign against the Catholic Church’s work with immigrants.
The latest target is Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (CCRGV) in South Texas, which runs a famed humanitarian respite center for migrant families.
The Department of Homeland Security has suspended this Catholic charity from all federal funding and moved to debar it for six years—an unusually harsh penalty.
DHS claims an audit found “pervasive” grant reporting violations, like inconsistent migrant records and billing outside allowed timeframes.
Officials accuse the charity, led by Sister Norma Pimentel, of mishandling data so badly they couldn’t verify if some people served had ever appeared in DHS databases.
Sister Norma, nationally known as the immigrants’ nun, flatly rejects any suggestion of wrongdoing.
Hales’s newsletter has become essential reading for me and other Americans seeking to better understand the ways in which Leo’s papacy is taking shape. Because Hale has both a robustly Catholic perspective and a keen understanding of American politics, his writing does a great job of blending updates from the Vatican and scoops on American Catholic culture with insightful points of view on our domestic challenges more generally. (If that sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe to his newsletter on Substack.)
There is nothing in this world (well, except maybe one thing! ) that will give me greater pleasure than to see this awful Speaker faceplanting over and over again! And in hope every time he does that, he lands in horseshit!!
I live and work in the Rio Grande Valley. One of their migrant shelters can be between my home and my workplace, depending on how I go home. They’ve been under attack by DJT II, aka Greg Abbott, aka Ironsides. I can’t begin to explain how important the Catholic charities are to these people- from the Pope to the people served, they are an absolute necessity in this poor part of both America and Texas. My wife was the Exec Director of the Habitat for Humanity here for a number of years. She worked with the sisters on many occasions. Let me tell you I’ll take the un-sworn-in casual conversation of any of the Sisters over sworn-in, gun-to-the-head, waterboarded politician’s words- state or federal- making these scurrilous accusations.