The Democrats Unveil a Secret Weapon on the Debt Ceiling

Photo courtesy of CNN

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) had a problem. It was clear from day one that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had overpromised to members of the far-right faction of the Republican caucus in order to secure their votes for the speakership. Among those promises was passing a bill that would tie the debt ceiling raise to certain drastic cuts to federal spending. It was, in short, a promise by McCarthy to hold the economy hostage right around the time the country ran out of money to pay its bills.

Jeffries knew that such a deal 1) would go nowhere in the Senate, and 2) was also a non-starter for the White House, which has insisted on a “clean” debt ceiling raise, no strings or cuts attached. An impasse could send the world economy over a cliff. But as leader of the minority in the House, Jeffries was powerless to do anything because all the legislative cards were held by McCarthy.

Or was he? Yesterday, as first reported by the New York Times, Democrats unveiled an intriguing, stealth plan to raise the debt ceiling: They would deploy a process known as a “discharge petition”—a little-used procedure that gets a bill out of Committee and to the House floor by a majority of member signatures. 

Many observers had already written off the idea, in part because it’s so tricky to achieve. Jeffries would need five GOP House members on board, and in any event, the Democrats were out of time because it takes 30 days after such a bill is submitted to a committee to even act on it.

So how is it now that the Democrats do in fact have a workable discharge petition plan, given these obstacles? Let’s discuss what a discharge petition is, and then walk through how the Democrats were able to bury it in the sands of various House committees until it was ready to be revealed. Finally, we’ll assess what additional leverage it might grant them as we head closer to an economic abyss.

What is a discharge petition?

A discharge petition is a way to bring a bill out of a committee and to the floor of the House or Senate. It is so named because it moves a bill out without a committee report by “discharging” the committee from having to further consider it. Such a maneuver requires a majority of the House members to sign on to it. Itcan be used, for example, when a bill is failing to advance because of the politics of a particular committee, or when the minority can win a handful of the other party’s members over to a cause.

Famous but rare, successful uses have included a petition to discharge the Judiciary Committee from further consideration of a resolution containing the Equal Rights Amendment. That was back in July of 1970, and the bill got sprung from the Judiciary Committee and passed the House three weeks later, but it failed to get through the Senate. In another example, in 2002 a discharge petition was used to gain approval of a piece of campaign finance legislation.

Generally, the move is sparingly used and often criticized because it wrests control of the House floor from the majority.

How did the Democrats sneak this in?

Technically, the Democrats did not create the discharge petition yet. What they did instead was file an innocuous bill across multiple committees. That bill could later serve as a kind of “shell” resolution on which to attach an amendment to raise the debt ceiling. That would only be possible if the bill could make it out of one of those committees, either by a normal vote of the committee or, if necessary, by way of a discharge petition signed by 218 House members. That’s 213 Democrats and 5 Republicans, for those doing the math.

Here’s how the plan went. Democratic strategists worked with a relatively unknown Congressmember, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA), on the crafting of a 45-page bill entitled “Breaking the Gridlock Act.”

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier. Photo courtesy of ABCNews7

DeSaulnier introduced the act back in January… and no one noticed. That was by design, and probably because it was so generic. Here are some of the earth shattering items the bill proposed, according to the New York Times:

It would create a task force to help grandparents raising grandchildren, create a federal strategy for reducing earthquake risks, change the name of a law that governs stock trading by members of Congress, extend small business loans, protect veterans from the I.R.S., authorize a new Pentagon grant program to protect nonprofit organizations against terrorist attacks and more. The legislation was so broad and eclectic that it was referred to 20 committees, where it has sat idle for months. That was the point.

Insiders called it the “Swiss army knife” bill because it could be referred to every single House committee, keeping open as many opportunities to get it to the House floor as possible. And once this innocuous, boring bill had languished for more than 30 days in all those committees, it was technically available to be discharged by way of petition, just in case there was a real crisis in the country.

“I wrote it in a way to be prepared,” said DeSaulnier, who once served on the Rules Committee. “I anticipated there would be these problems with the Republican caucus, whether it was abortion or the debt limit. I think it was the responsible thing as a legislator to do.”

Anyone who has ever followed parliamentary chess maneuvers should at this point tip their hat to DeSaulnier and the Democratic strategists.

The rest of the plan broke open when Democrats introduced an emergency rule on Tuesday, during what’s called a “pro forma” session. (For you political dabblers, that’s a session, usually with no one in attendance, held to ensure the House is technically not adjourned for more than three consecutive days in order to comply with the requirements of the Constitution.)

That emergency rule would start the clock on the time needed to act on a discharge petition as early as May 16 to bring DeSaulnier’s Trojan Horse bill to the floor. And here’s the kicker: Democrats would then amend the bill with a proposal to fix the debt ceiling issue. Both the discharge petition and the amendment would need 218 votes.

So do the Democrats have five Republican votes?

Not yet. And getting those is still a long shot, so let’s not get too excited just yet. But DeSaulnier’s bill does present some intriguing options that weren’t previously available.

Republicans are rather unhappy about the stealth bill because it makes them look outmaneuvered. “They’re not going to get any Republicans,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), the head of the far-right Freedom Caucus, snapped in a Tuesday interview with The Hill. “We already passed our bill.”

But everyone knows their bill is going nowhere in the Senate. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of that chamber has aptly called it the “Default on America” act. At some point, Democrats will likely respond with their own bill, and as I noted in yesterday’s piece, after that McCarthy likely won’t be able to muster 218 votes to shape a compromise. That’s because far-right extremists have already said they will accept nothing less than the cuts already proposed, and McCarthy has no votes to spare.

This still very likely leaves the nation without a bill to raise the debt ceiling, the two sides very far apart, and no way McCarthy can both deliver a solution and hold onto his job. For Jeffries, this only underscored the need for alternatives.

“House Democrats are working to make sure we have all options at our disposal to avoid a default,” wrote Jeffries in a letter to colleagues on Tuesday. “The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option. It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.”

It’s not the only option, however. There’s also the Problem Solvers caucus “backup plan.” That group comprises some five dozen House members, thirty or so from each side, whose stated mission is to fix the nation’s logjams. They already have a working proposal to kick the debt ceiling limit down the road till the end of the year, while establishing an outside commission to work on the budget. 

One member of the caucus, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), dismissed the discharge petition gambit as another “my way or the highway” approach from Jeffries. On the other hand, the co-chair of the Caucus, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), indicated earlier in the year that he might agree to a discharge petition “if that’s necessary.”

In the end, the two options might wind up working somehow in tandem. The Problem Solvers’ proposal could possibly gain a majority of support in the House and even win approval in the Senate, but it still needs a mechanism to advance it to the floor. The GOP leadership isn’t likely to offer that route up easily, so one way out is the secret weapon that Rep. DeSaulnier and the Democrats created. If the amendment to that bill winds up being something close to the Problem Solvers’ proposal, I could see five votes for it from among the thirty GOP members of that caucus.

More broadly, even if the discharge petition is never used, not even to support the Problem Solvers’ plan, the fact that it is now available creates an important public talking point for the Democrats. After all, the extremists in the GOP would only consider crashing the economy if they could pin the blame squarely on Biden and the Democrats for refusing to negotiate. The discharge petition allows Democrats to argue that they actually have an alternate plan—one that solves the emergency and gets us back on track—but that it’s the GOP that refuses to consider it. In fact, it’s stuck in committee and Republicans won’t even allow a floor vote on it. 

That shifts the burden back to the GOP to explain why it’s dug in on its own bill when there’s a perfectly viable alternative. Jeffries will still have to message around this effectively, but this is Jeffries we’re talking about. He’s had months to prepare, and I have a feeling he knows what he needs to do to deliver that message.