Congress returned to work in Washington, and one of the first issues lawmakers addressed was government health insurance subsidies. These temporary, emergency subsidies were first enacted during the coronavirus pandemic and expired at the end of last year. On Jan. 8, 213 Democrats and 17 Republicans voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies for three years.
This was a surprising development. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spent much of the autumn blocking Democrats from forcing a vote in the House of Representatives to extend the life of government subsidies for people who buy health insurance. Democrats, for their part, forced a lengthy government shutdown to force the speaker’s hand, which did not succeed.
But what a government shutdown could not achieve, a bipartisan parliamentary maneuver has done. First, four Republicans joined 214 Democrats in signing a discharge petition introduced by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) shortly before Congress left the Capitol for a holiday hiatus.
Under House rules, 218 legislators, a majority, can use a discharge petition to force a bill to a floor vote. Discharge Petition 10 required the potent House Rules Committee, which works closely with the speaker, to let go of House Resolution 780, which set the rules for debating, amending, and voting on the Obamacare subsidy legislation.
Once a majority votes for a petition, a clock starts. House Rule XV requires seven legislative days to pass before a legislator may call for a vote. Once that happens, the speaker must then set the vote within two days.
The clock expired on Jan. 6, the very first day the House of Representatives reconvened. Jeffries motioned for a vote, and Johnson scheduled the vote for the next day. Some 224 legislators, including 11 Republicans, voted to approve the rule. That paved the way for the extension of the Obamacare subsidies the next day, which passed 230-196, with 17 Republicans in support.
It was a stunning reversal of fortune for the speaker. But it is not difficult to see why it happened. GOP members from swing districts are facing challenging reelections as voters sour on President Donald Trump and Republicans. These legislators felt they had to vote for a healthcare bill to protect their seats and preserve their party’s majority.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) were the first GOP legislators to break with the speaker when they signed Discharge Petition 10. Each of them expressed concern that voters who saw their healthcare premiums increase would take it out on them.
Lawler said he signed the petition “to force a vote and prevent higher health care costs for families in the Hudson Valley. Allowing the enhanced premium tax credits to expire would mean immediate premium hikes for working families, seniors, and small business owners in NY-17.”
That vote, Lawler explained, did not mean he was a fan of the subsidies policy. He called it overly broad and advocated passing a more targeted healthcare subsidies bill that was less expensive and more targeted to the truly needy.
Lawler also expressed his exasperation at Republicans’ failure to pass their own legislation. They have known since they arrived in January 2025 that the subsidies would expire. Yet the House did not pass a healthcare fix.
Fitzpatrick also fumed at the inaction. He introduced his own bill in December 2025 to prevent healthcare premiums from sharply rising, and then he filed a discharge petition to try to force a vote. His petition drew support from Republicans and Democrats but did not get enough signatures, so he subsequently joined Jeffries’s petition in hopes of forcing debate and a vote. “When leadership blocks action entirely, Congress has a responsibility to act. My priority is ensuring Hudson Valley families aren’t caught in the gridlock,” Lawler said.
Unsurprisingly, some Republicans denounced them for putting their names on a Democrat’s petition, and members of the House Freedom Caucus have been particularly critical of extending the subsidies. They have been trying to wrangle sufficient votes to abolish and replace Obamacare. “We should NOT be throwing more money at Obamacare, which is rife with fraud. We have to let Biden’s COVID-era subsidies EXPIRE,” Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) posted on X. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) groused, “Obamacare promised affordable care. Instead, families are stuck with soaring premiums, shrinking networks, and Washington red tape. America deserves a patient-centered system, NOT a government-centered one.”
This is the fourth discharge petition that has garnered the requisite 218 signatures since January 2025. Votes have also been forced on bottled-up legislation to allow pregnant legislators to vote remotely, override Trump’s executive order removing union rights from certain federal employees, and to release the government’s files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. The House has not had four successful discharge petitions since the Congress of 1937-1938, George Washington University professor Sarah Binder notes.
Johnson shrugged off the development and fended off the media who asked if it was a sign that he had lost control of the House. “Look, we have the smallest majority in U.S. history. … There are processes and procedures in the House that are less frequently used when there are larger majorities.”
He is not wrong. The discharge petition has been a House rule for a century, and a narrow partisan majority makes it easier for a unified, large partisan minority to peel off a few majority votes to advance a discharge petition. And the majorities in the House have been very small in the past few decades.
Yet, narrow majorities are not the whole of the story, as Catholic University professor Matthew Green explains. Between the years 2000 and 2023, there frequently were narrow majorities, yet only two petitions got 218 signees during that period: the bill that became the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law and the legislation reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank in 2015.
“The current success of discharge petitions,” Green writes, “follows years of Republicans defying their leaders on petitions and doing so with impunity.” Discharge petitions succeed when a majority contains factions that are willing to buck the speaker. Democrats experienced something similar in the 1970s when their own dissidents used petitions to force legislation onto the House’s agenda.
FOUR TAKEAWAYS FROM HOUSE OVERSIGHT’S HEATED MINNESOTA FRAUD HEARING
It is unclear whether the Senate will approve the legislation. Last year, the Senate shot down a bill proposing a three-year extension of the Obamacare subsidies. Nor is it certain that Trump would sign the bill.
But these dissident Republicans will have achieved their goal: showing their home district voters they tried. Whether voters will spare them in November remains to be seen.
Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and edits UnderstandingCongress.org.
