This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“I’ve heard more about a discharge petition in the last two days from foreign leaders—at the highest levels—than in my prior 11 years in office combined.” —House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, at the Munich Security Conference
With Congress on recess, both the House and Senate sent sizable delegations to the annual Munich Security Conference to schmooze with world leaders about the pressing global issues of the day. It just happened to be the case that during this year’s gathering, an acute international security matter is pending in the House of Representatives.
The world is waiting to see whether the U.S. will extend its commitment to Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. As Russia gains territory and Ukraine runs low on ammunition, Speaker Mike Johnson is sitting on a Senate-passed bill containing $60 billion in assistance for the Ukrainian defense effort. (Another bipartisan group in the House has put forward a separate measure offering around $47.7 billion for Ukraine assistance, paired with some border security measures. The endless legislative loop continues apace.) Johnson, whom Republican hard-liners could seek to defenestrate should he allow a vote on Ukraine assistance, has thrown cold water on the Senate bill, saying that “the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters” and that “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”
The question in Munich, then—and it’s quite a question—was whether the United States would really abandon its role as a guarantor of Europe’s security, and what domines could fall should that scenario come to pass. (Thanks for playing, Taiwan?)
It’s interesting then—and, frankly, embarrassing—to see other world leaders having to dig through byzantine congressional processes to see if there’s a way to circumvent Speaker Johnson. What about a discharge petition?—a process by which a majority of members can force a vote on a particular bill—is a recurring question from Hill reporters about a process that almost never comes to pass, and useful fodder for news explainers whenever a critical bill is stalled in the House. The fact that other world leaders are apparently peppering the House Democratic leader about this, too, makes for a sad state of affairs.
But anyway … to force a vote on the Senate’s foreign assistance bill, what about a discharge petition?
One common problem with discharge petitions is that the process is cumbersome and requires long waiting periods—although Democrats believe that one broadly written discharge petition they had filed last year as a last-ditch measure to avoid debt default could be used here. Still, there are various finicky rules surrounding discharge petitions that don’t make them the most time-sensitive option. And Democrats would need to get a substantial number of Republicans to break ranks with their own leadership, since a decent chunk of Democrats would remove their names from the discharge petition in opposition to the bill’s assistance for Israel.
Discharge petitions aren’t “hot” anymore, anyway. The trendier speaker-circumvention method under discussion these days is “defeating the previous question.” That’s a process in which a majority defeats a common procedural vote and briefly hijacks control of the floor. We encourage Volodymyr Zelensky or Olaf Scholz, or whoever these muckety-mucks were (Kate Middleton?), to pepper Jeffries about “defeating the PQ” to pass foreign assistance.
Alternately, they could just pressure the hell out of Mike Johnson to pass Ukraine aid on conventional grounds.