Rank-and-file House members are going around leaders to force votes at unprecedented rate. What does that mean for Congress in 2026?

WASHINGTON – In October 2015, dozens of Republicans joined a minor revolt led by then-Rep. Denny Heck and the House’s Democratic minority to go around the GOP chairman of the Financial Services Committee and reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that finances foreign purchases from Boeing and other U.S. companies.

“This is a once-in-a-generation thing,” Heck, a Democrat who then represented Olympia and is now Washington state’s lieutenant governor, told reporters at the time.

The process Heck used – known as a discharge petition, which circumvents House leaders to force a vote once a majority of the chamber’s 435 members signs on – hadn’t been deployed successfully in 13 years, and before that only a handful of times in half a century. But in 2025, the once-extraordinary legislative maneuver took on unprecedented relevance.

After a bill is introduced in the House, it’s referred to a committee, whose leader has the power to “kill” the legislation by simply never bringing it up for a vote. But if a bill sits in a committee for at least 30 days, a discharge petition can force a vote – whether leaders like it or not – once it gains at least 218 signatures.

The current Congress has been less productive than any in modern history, in terms of the number of bills signed into law – fewer than 40, according to data from C-SPAN maintained by Purdue University. Amid that historic inaction, discharge petitions reached that threshold four times this year.

After her petition to let new parents vote by proxy for 12 weeks after a child’s birth reached the threshold in March, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., struck a deal with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., that avoided a vote. Democrats who had backed the effort voiced disappointment, but it showed that Johnson had less control over his party than many previous speakers did.

Cornell Clayton, a professor of political science at Washington State University, said discharge petitions were used more frequently in the first half of the 20th century. The surge in their use this year, he said, is the result of a slim GOP majority and the fact that Johnson owes his position as speaker to President Donald Trump, not to the loyalty of his fellow House Republicans.

“What distinguishes the use of the discharge petitions today,” Clayton said, “is that traditionally they were used by the minority party in order to get bills before the House, but now they’re being used increasingly by both parties.”

Starting in September, Johnson sent House members home for an extraordinary eight-week break, partly to avoid swearing in a recently elected lawmaker who had promised she would be the final signature needed on a discharge petition to force a vote to order the Justice Department to release its files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. When the speaker finally had to reconvene the House to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the dam broke.

With a razor-thin GOP majority in the House, as few as four Republicans can force a vote via discharge petition if every Democrat signs on. Despite pressure from Trump, four GOP lawmakers – Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – refused to withdraw their signatures and forced a vote.

Virtually no Republican wanted to take a public stand against revealing documents related to Epstein, who socialized with prominent members of both parties before and after he was accused of sexually abusing girls, so the House voted almost unanimously in November to order the files’ release, and the GOP-controlled Senate swiftly approved the measure without a recorded vote.

Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Sunnyside, said that while he’s personally “not a fan of discharges,” the procedure is an important “safety valve” for the House. He pointed out that by circumventing the committee process, bills advanced by discharge petition don’t have the opportunity to be refined through the amendment process.

Amid the furor over the Epstein files vote, the third successful discharge petition of 2025 quietly gained its 218th signature. Led by retiring Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a moderate Democrat, the effort forced a vote to overturn Trump’s executive orders that stripped collective bargaining rights away from more than 1 million unionized workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies.

Twenty Republicans joined Democrats to pass the “Protect America’s Workforce Act,” sending it to the Senate. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have backed that bill so far, leaving it five votes shy of the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome the filibuster in the upper chamber.

Even if that bill passed the Senate, Trump would likely veto it, since it seeks to undo his action that critics have called the single biggest act of union-busting in U.S. history. It takes a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate to override a presidential veto.

Based on a story George Washington told Thomas Jefferson – perhaps apocryphally – in the early years of the United States, the slow-moving Senate is often described as a saucer that cools the more rambunctious House’s hot cup of coffee. Now, thanks to the increasing use of discharge petitions, the House’s cup runneth over – and it’s not clear if the Senate will stop every popular bill that emerges from the lower chamber in 2026.

When Congress reconvenes in January, the House is expected to take a vote forced by the fourth successful discharge petition of 2025, which would extend expiring subsidies for health insurance plans purchased from HealthCare.gov or state-run marketplaces. The more than 24 million Americans who rely on those plans, enabled by the Affordable Care Act of 2010, have seen their monthly premium payments roughly double as tax credits created by Democrats in 2021 expire at the end of 2025.

After unsuccessfully pushing Johnson to allow a vote on a bipartisan plan to extend and reform the tax credits, four frustrated House Republicans signed a petition led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., that would force a vote to extend the subsidies for three years with no reforms. That bill is sure to stall in the Senate, where the GOP majority opposes continuing the costly tax credits without addressing fraud and other problems in the insurance program, but the petition’s success ensures that health care will remain in the spotlight.

Jeffries and other Democratic leaders have so far refused to support bipartisan efforts to save the insurance subsidies, apparently preferring to campaign on the problem of high health insurance costs in 2026 rather than solving it, but moderate Democrats and Republicans have started their own discharge petitions in an effort to go around leaders of both parties and force votes on two different compromise proposals. Both would extend the subsidies with measures intended to crack down on fraud and set income limits, so low-income taxpayers aren’t subsidizing health insurance for much wealthier Americans.

“I think it’s an important check on a leadership that’s more interested in winning than governing,” said Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat who represents southwestern Washington and has signed both bipartisan health care petitions.

In a brief interview at the Capitol on Dec. 16, Gluesenkamp Perez lamented that her own party’s leaders hadn’t gotten behind either of the compromise proposals. If Jeffries’ preferred bill stalls in January, pressure on Democrats to strike a deal may increase.

Health care isn’t the only issue where solution-oriented Democrats are at odds with their party’s leaders, who are focused on maximizing gains in the upcoming midterm elections. As Punchbowl News reported, when another discharge petition that would ban stock trading by members of Congress and their immediate family members started gaining signatures from both parties – a total of 74 by year’s end – Democratic leaders put forward their own proposal that would also ban such investments by the president and vice president, knowing that would be politically dangerous for Republicans.

Whatever happens in 2026, it seems clear that discharge petitions will continue to play a major role in the political dynamics in Congress. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Bellevue, suggested that the tool has empowered moderate members of both parties after an era when hardliners had outsize influence.

“We can all be nostalgic for the world where the leadership really had control of things and made decisions based on the best interest of the body as a whole,” Smith said in a brief interview at the Capitol, “but I think we can all agree that era is, at least for the moment, gone.”