House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has repeatedly said that the only debt ceiling bill he’ll bring to the floor will include Democratic concessions. The Republican’s position has been consistent: In this extortion scheme, no ransom means no vote.
House Democratic leaders, however, have long hoped to circumvent McCarthy with a tactic called a discharge petition. As regular readers might recall, if a simple majority of House members sign on to a discharge petition in support of a specific piece of legislation, the measure advances to the floor for a vote, whether the sitting speaker likes it or not.
With this in mind, the House minority party have been trying to force a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase ahead of the default deadline. The first hurdle was getting every member of the Democratic conference to sign onto the measure. As NBC News reported, they’ve now cleared that hurdle.
House Democratic leaders said Wednesday that all 213 members of their Democratic Caucus now have signed a discharge petition to bypass McCarthy and force a vote to raise the debt ceiling. It’s “another sign of the unity that we have,” Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., told reporters, “and we know who we are fighting for — it’s the American people, and that’s what continues to drive our work.”
There were two Democratic holdouts — Hawaii’s Ed Case and Maine’s Jared Golden — who have routinely been at odds with their more progressive colleagues — but this week, they finally came around.
“House Democrats are unified in avoiding a default,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters this morning. The New York Democrat added that “it will take only five reasonable Republicans to end this madness, to avoid the economy from crashing, to prevent a job-killing recession. … Only five out of 222 to end this madness.”
That might sound like a relatively modest goal: If just five House Republicans sign on to the discharge petition and vote for a clean…
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