EXCLUSIVE — Centrist House Republicans are urging both parties to stop playing political games and come together to address the Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits, due to expire at midnight.
In a series of interviews with the Washington Examiner, they laid blame on both Republican and Democratic leadership for forcing a vote on a three-year clean extension.
Ahead of the holidays, four Republicans joined all Democrats in signing a Democratic-led discharge petition, a measure that forces a vote on a bill that leadership is unwilling to bring to the floor. It’s not often nowadays that Republicans join Democrats on much of anything, and it’s especially rare that GOP lawmakers use a petition, often deemed a “tool of the minority” by their leaders.
But members such as Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) and Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) insist that Republicans need to be on the right side of this issue, as the public’s healthcare premiums are expected to skyrocket after Jan. 1, 2026, due to the expiring Obamacare subsidies and no action from Congress.
The Pennsylvania Republicans were two of the four GOP lawmakers who signed the Democrats’ three-year ACA petition. Mackenzie told the Washington Examiner that he signed the petition because he ran for office on protecting affordability, noting that he isn’t afraid to vote against GOP policies he believes will raise costs for families and seniors.
“I think I’ve been very clear with constituents at public events, with our leadership, that affordability and cost-of-living issues are very important to me,” he said.
While Republicans signing onto the petition was a rebuke of their own leadership, some lawmakers said they placed blame on the Democrats, as well, for having to go with the last resort of a three-year extension.
Mackenzie pointed to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-NY) decision not to endorse either the one- or two-year ACA extension petitions offered by a bipartisan pair and calling the one-year extension “laughable.”
“Leader Jeffries dismissed that out of hand,” Mackenzie said. “There are members in his conference or caucus that have said this, on the record, ‘Well, leadership doesn’t want us signing on to these discharge petitions for these bipartisan efforts.’ So I’m very focused on it. But unfortunately, what I see is just a lot of politics being played on this issue, and it’s the American people that are getting hurt.”
‘Ripping the rug out’
Bresnahan said in an interview he’s not a big fan of the three-year extension, but without any action, he thinks letting the subsidies expire and “ripping the rug out from underneath people isn’t the right thing.”
“I have to think about the over 28,000 people inside of northeastern Pennsylvania that depend on some sort of subsidy for their health insurance … When I think about who elected me to serve in Washington, D.C. and represent them, it’s the people here in Pennsylvania 8th Congressional district. It wasn’t Washington, D.C.,” Bresnahan said.
Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA), who didn’t sign the Democrats’ petition but has one of her own, said in an interview that she has frustrations with both parties. As a healthcare provider, she said she recognizes the importance of having a short-term solution to negotiate long-term reforms, but she is disgruntled with the lack of attention the subsidies and healthcare in general are receiving from Republicans.
“I really wish that we would be listening a little more to these [centrist purple] districts that, I mean — yes, there’s a political side that, if they could at least be mindful of that,” Kiggans said of Republican leadership.
But, she added, she’s frustrated with Democrats for rejecting her one-year proposal seemingly for political reasons.
“The Democrats could sign our discharge petition because it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “Don’t not sign our discharge petition just because you want to stick it to the Republicans … They, too, could have gotten their members on board, and we could have gotten this done. So, it’s frustrating on both sides.”
She also placed blame on the short time frame the House had to take action, particularly after the record-breaking government shutdown that kept the lower chamber out of session for 54 days.
“It’s just — it’s a longer conversation,” Kiggans said. “This is a complex problem with a complex solution that we couldn’t solve by the December 31 deadline.”
Lighting a fire
The Senate has already voted down a three-year extension, and Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has said that it is likely to be dead on arrival when it comes from the lower chamber. But the House, in Mackenzie’s opinion, won’t get enough support to vote on Kiggans’s or Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s (R-PA) bills.
By voting for a three-year extension, however, the Pennsylvania congressman is hopeful it will light a fire under those already pursuing bipartisan negotiations in the Senate.
“I think it breathes new life into the topic and the conversation, and gives them, then, the ability to say, ‘OK, is there a compromise, something similar to what we’ve offered in both the Kiggans package and the Fitzpatrick bill,’” Mackenzie said.
The vote will “show that there is the appetite, both short and long term, through the House, but then it’s going to be back in the Senate’s court,” he added. “They’re going to have to be the ones that are going to have to stitch together a compromise.”
He said both parties need to change their approach to healthcare, which has seen “so much partisanship” and “so much dysfunction.” To move forward, he stressed the importance of the parties working together.
“We see what happens every time: one party moves in or out of power, whoever makes a change, the other one tries to go in and replace it or take it out of statute, and then you’re in this pendulum where the healthcare system is going back and forth, and there’s no stability for individual users,” he said. “So, I think the best path forward is in a bipartisan way, because then whoever is in power in the future, there will be advocates in that conference or caucus that say, ‘Hey, no, this is something that we supported.’”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has yet to schedule a vote on the three-year ACA tax credit extension, but said it would happen in January. Lawmakers on both sides are hoping they can reach a bipartisan solution quickly to avoid a cram session at the end of January — particularly with a Jan. 31, 2026, government funding deadline fast approaching.
Bresnahan said “time is certainly of the essence” when it comes to scheduling a vote, and doing so will give members the opportunity to “decide what is best for the people in which we represent.”
The three-year extension is expected to gain support from 20 to 30 House Republicans. But Kiggans won’t be one of them.
She said she won’t vote for a three-year clean extension of the Obamacare subsidies if there are no reforms in place. Instead, she hopes to see enough Republicans come together and sign either her or Fitzpatrick’s petitions now that they will be forced to take a vote on a clean extension.
“There still is time, I believe, to get the signatures we need and to offer people in our conference like me who want to see reform and get a little bit of a longer runway,” she said. “We have other options there, and I will continue to push our colleagues to sign on to these one- and two-year extensions with reforms in place, because I think those are better options than a clean, three-year extension.”
There are enough Republicans on the petitions from Fitzpatrick and Kiggans to force a vote if most Democrats sign on. But Democrats are unlikely to support anything less than the three-year extension.
The detraction put GOP leadership in a bind. Johnson and House GOP leaders expressed disappointment but understanding after four of their members joined the Democrats’ discharge petition, which forces Johnson to bring up the bill whether he likes it or not.
“It’s not an act of defiance,” Johnson insisted after the House voted for the GOP’s healthcare plan. “I understand what they’re doing. I understand that every member has a different district with different dynamics and different demographics. And some of them felt like it was a really important thing to have a vote on the floor. I tried very hard.”
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Mackenzie empathized with the speaker’s “difficult job” due to razor-thin margins, saying that the centrist lawmakers also tried to come to a different solution.
“We tried every other avenue in the House,” Mackenzie said. “We tried working with our conference, we tried the discharge petitions, we couldn’t get the support of all of our conference on certain things, and our leadership couldn’t. We let our leadership know that throughout the process, we have said, ‘If these talks fail with our groups and leadership on our side, then this is the alternative that is out there that remains … and that’s where we ended up.”
