Here’s a fun little unexpected update. After failing to come to an agreement with leadership about a vote on their bill to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies, Republican moderates in the House of Representatives turned to their “break glass in case of emergency” option.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had filed a discharge petition—a mechanism that can force a vote on a measure blocked by leadership if the majority of members sign it—for a clean, three-year extension. At the start of the week, it had 214 signers, all Democrats, and needed four more to trigger a vote. Discontented moderates filled in the gap on Wednesday, and the House is set to vote on the measure once it comes back in January.
After the petition gained the requisite signatures, many observers described the situation as a debacle for Speaker Mike Johnson, and there is some truth to that. As Punchbowl News’s Thursday newsletter said, “Party leadership is supposed to protect their members from bad votes,” and now many House Republicans will be on the record voting against a measure meant to stop premiums from rising for millions of Americans—which will be Democratic campaign fodder, no doubt.
But consider also that this is not quite an unmitigated disaster for leadership. Johnson and his team get to tell their caucus that they tried their best to stop a vote on something unpopular within the GOP but were unable. And the Republicans who signed the discharge petition now get to tell their constituents on the campaign trail that they’re willing to buck their own party leadership to bring down costs.
In any case, this extension is not going to become law: the Senate already rejected a similar measure last week. But the mini revolt could be the impetus for the two sides to come to a deal related to health care in the new year.
Top Stories From the Dispatch Politics Team
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When President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week intending to preempt state regulations on artificial intelligence, his stated intention was to create one national regulatory standard and avoid a patchwork of state laws that could place undue burdens on tech companies and stymie innovation. Whether Trump has the legal authority to muscle states into shedding laws they have passed as AI has grown to prominence is questionable. But Trump’s move represents yet another shift of power toward the executive—in line with a trend that has been accelerating in the past few decades—and reignites a debate that took place in Congress earlier this summer.
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