Negotiations between the White House and Speaker Kevin McCarthy on raising the debt ceiling are underway. But there are still two main ways things could go wrong. First, the talks could simply fail, resulting in no deal. Second, if there is a deal, McCarthy could struggle to pass it through the House because of opposition from the right. Either failure path could well lead to a disastrous default on the nation’s debt.
So House Democrats are moving ahead with their long-shot backup plan: a discharge petition.
Basically, a discharge petition forces the House to take action on a particular bill — say, a bill increasing the debt limit — even if the speaker or key committees don’t want to act.
The theory here is that maybe enough reasonable Democrats and Republicans could join together to pass a debt ceiling increase, if they got to vote on one. But McCarthy might not allow them to vote on such a bill if it’s strongly opposed from the right, since that would risk his speakership. So this would go around him.
But like any petition, a discharge petition needs signatures — 218 signatures, which would be a majority of the House. Democrats announced Wednesday that they’d begin collecting those signatures. Since there are only 213 House Democrats, they’d need five Republicans to sign on too, or else the petition would fail.
At the moment, that seems very unlikely. A discharge petition is a bold challenge to the speaker’s authority, effectively wrenching control of the chamber out of his hands. In this case, it would also undercut his negotiating strategy, since he is purportedly trying to win concessions Republicans want. The few moderate Republicans who’d seem most likely to sign on have all solidly backed McCarthy’s strategy of negotiating with the White House. They will not split from him lightly.
It isn’t even clear yet what bill Democrats would want to force action on — they’ve used placeholder text that could be changed to their liking…
Read the full article here
