In the House of Representatives, the speaker controls everything, from office space to what legislation can get a vote on the House floor. But lately, time and again, Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost his grip.
It happened on Thursday, when Mr. Johnson was forced to stand by, powerless to stop a group of breakaway Republicans from teaming up with Democrats to pass what amounted to a rebuke of President Trump, delivered by a legislative body run by his own party.
In a 231-to-195 vote, the House approved a bill by Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative Democrat, that would overturn a Trump executive order that stripped union protections from scores of federal workers.
The measure faces long odds in the Senate. But its success in the House was the latest indication that Mr. Johnson’s hold on his razor-thin majority has become increasingly slippery, as rank-and-file Republicans flout his wishes.
They are doing so not just by refusing to vote for the party position on important bills, but also, increasingly, by using a once-rare parliamentary maneuver to steer around the speaker and commandeer the House floor to bring up legislation that he does not want considered at all. The tactic has undercut Mr. Johnson’s leadership and diminished his power over the chamber’s agenda at a time when some rank-and-file Republicans are questioning his approach and complaining that he is disregarding the will of his members.
That has led more and more Republicans to resort to what is known as a discharge petition, a procedural tool that allows lawmakers to bypass House leaders and force legislation to the floor if a majority of the chamber’s members — 218 of them — sign on.
Mr. Golden used one on Thursday to get his labor bill to the floor, where 20 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it, and more are pending on other issues that Mr. Johnson has yet to address.
Discharge petitions were once rare and had little chance of success, especially since signing one is one of Congress’s more publicly visible acts. When members launch such an effort, they place physical copies of the petition on the House clerk’s desk at the front of the chamber. Even as Congress has become increasingly digitized, lawmakers must sign their names in person, and their signatures are reported online.
Historically, members of the majority hesitated to embarrass their party’s leaders, and lawmakers feared retaliation for publicly supporting efforts to subvert the speaker. The petitions were viewed more as public statements of discontent than viable legislative vehicles.
But Thursday was the third time this year that Republican leaders, who with a slim majority can afford only a few defections, have been forced to contend with runaway discharge petitions that they could not stop. When they succeed, they can be particularly painful for leaders of the majority, teeing up politically tricky votes on matters that divide the party.
“I am not a fan of discharge petitions,” Mr. Johnson told reporters this week. “It is typically used as a tool against the majority.”
The highest-profile example was the bipartisan push that forced a vote that Mr. Johnson had toiled for months to avoid on legislation to compel the Justice Department to release its investigative files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It sailed through the House and Senate and quickly became law.
“Luckily, it doesn’t happen often,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican. “But the times it has happened, I have not been a fan of that process being used.”
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Thursday’s vote came as Mr. Johnson has been grappling with other signs of discontent from within his conference. At least twice this month, Republicans have struggled to secure the votes necessary to bring bills to the floor, forcing leaders to negotiate as lawmakers threaten their agenda. Last week, a bill to address oversight of college sports was removed from consideration after it became clear that Republicans did not have the votes to pass it.
On Wednesday, a procedural vote to bring a defense policy bill to the floor stalled for nearly an hour short of the support it needed. Mr. Johnson was in the House chamber haggling separately with two holdout factions — hard-line conservatives like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and a small band of moderate lawmakers — before finally getting enough of them to relent.
The episode highlighted Mr. Johnson’s difficulties in corralling his restive rank and file even on a procedural vote on which party unity is generally considered mandatory. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, said she would not tolerate defections on such a measure, known as a rule, when she was in charge.
“Every now and then, somebody would say, ‘I’m not for the bill, so I’m not for the rule,’” she said, before describing her response: “You know what? Go on the other side of the aisle, because that’s not the way it works. You don’t want the bill? Vote against the bill.”
But discharge petitions have been the most visible and public threats to Mr. Johnson’s control of the House. The maneuvers seem to be a kind of legislative hydra: Each time Republican leaders put one behind them, three more seem to spring up in its place.
Even now, with just one week left to go before they depart for the year, Republican lawmakers are affixing their names to three different discharge petitions that would force votes on bills that Mr. Johnson does not want to consider.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who already found some success with a discharge petition earlier this year aimed at allowing members of Congress to vote by proxy after the birth of a child, is now trying to force a vote on a measure that would ban lawmakers and their family members from trading stocks. As of Thursday afternoon, 14 of her 58 signatures have come from Republicans.
And as G.O.P. lawmakers debate the best way to address rising health care costs, some Republicans have signed on to two separate discharge petitions — one by Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and another by Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey — that would tee up votes on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year.
Both petitions have enough support from Republicans that they would succeed if Democrats united to endorse either of them, something they are unlikely to do because they are holding out for a longer-term extension than either bill would provide. But the number of G.O.P. signatures — Mr. Fitzpatrick has 10 and Mr. Gottheimer has 11 — indicates how eager some Republicans are to go around Mr. Johnson and hold a vote, which has given Democrats remarkable power over the direction of a major legislative debate.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said the maneuver was a last resort to get action on a policy issue that his party was refusing to quickly address.
“You try to do things through the normal course, you try to do things through normal order, you know,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “When all of those remedies are exhausted, then you’ve got to go this route, unfortunately.”
Mr. Johnson said he understood his colleagues’ decisions, pointing to the “situation in their districts.” But others view the petitions as a needed check on the leadership’s grip on the House floor.
Ms. Greene, the Georgia Republican who is set to resign in January, said on Wednesday that she was weighing supporting every discharge petition that is introduced before she leaves, regardless of her views on the measure it supports.
Doing so would give her a lasting impact. Even if they resign or die in office, members’ signatures remain on discharge petitions until they are formally replaced, a process that can take months.
In a social media post, Ms. Greene said that she thought that every representative “deserves the right to represent their district and receive a recorded vote on their bills.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
The post Republicans Undercut Johnson, Circumventing Him to Force Votes appeared first on New York Times.
