Four live discharge petitions. Being forced to bargain for GOP support during simple procedural votes. Calls to Cabinet secretaries from the House floor to help win over members. A prolonged debate on health care with a disengaged president. Potential retirements on the horizon.
This is the House Republican majority with less than 11 months until the midterm elections.
OK, we won’t say that the House is in total chaos. Total chaos is when members unleash censure resolutions against each other or a trio of House Republicans publicly claim Speaker Mike Johnson has no business running the chamber. That was last week.
But there’s a very tenuous reality for Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer as they navigate the post-shutdown climate with a soon-to-be-even-thinner three vote margin.
Fear of President Donald Trump kept everyone in line earlier this year, especially on the One Big Beautiful Bill. Trump’s poll ratings have fallen, however, and Republicans took a bad beating in last month’s elections.
Members are retiring or running for other offices, meaning they have their own agendas. Most importantly, Republicans could lose the House next year, and GOP lawmakers are beginning to think more about their own political survival rather than what party leaders are selling.
There were a pair of episodes this week to demonstrate just how shaky the House GOP leadership’s control is.
House Republicans struggled for more than an hour Wednesday to pass a rule to begin debate on the NDAA, the typically bipartisan Pentagon policy bill.
In order to flip hardline conservatives, including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Johnson had to call Secretary of State Marco Rubio from a room off the House floor. Rubio agreed to look into NGOs that are funneling money to the Taliban. This was just one of a trio of promises made to pass the rule.
Separately, GOP moderates wanted to hear from Johnson on whether he’d put a bill on the floor to extend enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies, a huge political and policy problem for Republicans. Unsatisfied with his answer, these Republican moderates dropped a discharge petition to go over Johnson’s head.
Live discharge petitions — which effectively strip power from the GOP leadership — have become more common than ever in Johnson’s House. The sheer number of successful discharge petitions is stunning and shows just how poor the outlook is for Johnson and his top lieutenants. Remember what happened with the Jeffrey Epstein vote.
Consider this:
— Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) will get a vote today on a bill overturning Trump’s executive order barring federal workers from collective bargaining rights. Five Republicans signed onto the petition. The measure will pass the House, delivering a rebuke to Trump, although it won’t pass the Senate. But we’ll see it come up again during January’s government-funding fights.
— Luna is among a bipartisan group of members pushing a discharge petition to institute a stock trading ban for members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children. Johnson disagrees with the bill and doesn’t want it to pass. The petition only has 41 signatures, including 14 Republicans. But during the NDAA standoff, Luna was able to extract a promise from Johnson to put a stock trading ban on the floor.
— Frustrated with Johnson’s inaction, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) has a discharge petition to extend the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies. Fitzpatrick, a swing-district centrist, has enough Republican signatories to win a floor vote. What Democrats do here remains to be seen, lending credence to the argument that the minority has major sway on the House floor.
— Five Republicans have already joined Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) on a different discharge petition for a bill that would extend the Obamacare subsidies for one year. That means this effort also has enough GOP backing to be successful if Democrats universally back it. The House Democratic leadership prefers this petition to Fitzpatrick’s.
This new petition or Fitzpatrick’s measure could feasibly reach 218 signatures, starving Johnson of his ability to set the party’s course on health care.
Johnson rightfully understands that the vast majority of House Republicans aren’t in favor of extending the Obamacare tax credits that have been at the heart of the House tumult over the last few months. But there are certainly enough House Republicans who could pair with Democrats to renew the subsidies at some point in the next few months.
Johnson, Scalise and Emmer are trying to create their own plan. They’ve given Republicans a menu of options from which he will build a bill for floor consideration next week. It’s not clear whether any package can pass. As Trump once said, health care is complicated.
What’s concerning many House Republicans in the GOP leadership: Johnson has said he will stretch the health care debate straight into the second quarter of next year. There isn’t any Republican who thinks it’s a good idea for the GOP to be talking about health care — their worst issue — during an election year.
Also. The Indiana Senate is expected to vote on the state’s new congressional map today. This is a big moment for the GOP and the 2026 midterms. The map that the Senate is considering wipes out two Democrats to give the GOP a clean, nine-seat sweep in the Hoosier State. It also could trigger Democrats to act in Maryland and potentially Illinois.
