In a normal debt ceiling debate — if anything about this manufactured crisis can be called “normal” — congressional leaders jockey to avoid blame for the national debt before reluctantly passing a bill to avert default that everyone knew all along they would pass. This time, however, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) owes his job to hard-line conservatives who don’t want the debt ceiling raised unless it is paired with historic entitlement-spending concessions. That leaves the speaker tied tightly to a position that is a nonstarter for the party that holds the White House and half of the legislative branch — with a potentially cataclysmic default of the U.S. government hanging in the balance.
How to escape this dangerous stalemate? This week, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who was the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee during the last big debt limit showdown, suggested that a “discharge petition” is the most likely way out.
The discharge process, established in 1910, enables a majority of the House to sidestep the speaker and committee chairs to push forward needed legislation on their own. Because it allows a majority of the House to circumvent committees and the speaker, the mechanism was meant as a sort of emergency release valve. If House leaders refused to bring a popular bill to a vote, rank-and-file members had a means to go around them.
So far so good — except it won’t be of much use in dealing with the debt limit. There is a twofold problem.
First, discharge is an extremely slow process: A given bill must sit in committee for 30 legislative days. Then 218 House members have to sign a petition calling for it to be “discharged” to the floor. Then that petition needs to sit on a House calendar for seven legislative days. And only then can a member bring the bill to a vote.
Second, the discharge process is clumsy. For it to work, this rogue majority of House members would need to strike a deal with Senate leaders far in advance, then pass that deal through both chambers without changes — or the House members who discharged the bill lose control of it to the speaker.
Put simply, the discharge process is not designed to accommodate fluid bicameral negotiations up against an uncertain deadline. Using it to address the debt limit would be like trying to win a Formula One race in a semitruck.
But there is an alternative that could work: simply hijacking the House floor. At the end of the day, a majority runs the House. If just five Republican moderates aligned with Democrats, a majority of House members could navigate the complex set of votes, motions and amendments needed to pass a debt limit bill over the objections of McCarthy and their Republican colleagues. Procedurally, there is basically nothing stopping this. And it would not require long waits or advanced negotiations.
But there is no modern precedent for this actually happening — and for the same reason that discharge petitions are vanishingly rare.
At core, there is no getting around the fact that both a discharge process and renegade floor action would represent partisan heresy. The problem with the discharge process, in other words, is not the arduous waiting periods or complex procedural maneuvers it requires, but the incredible political pressure that Republicans members would endure from leaders, conservative media and vocal constituents if they tried it. The reasons discharge petitions succeed only 2 percent of the time is the same reason that cross-partisan alliances don’t hijack the House floor: The political cost of turning your back on your colleagues is too high. Just ask Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
That said, political careers very well could be the cost of raising the debt ceiling in 2023. Republican moderates sidestepping their leadership and conference risk a career-ending primary. If McCarthy allows a debt limit vote — or simply fails to oppose moderates’ efforts stringently enough — conservatives could trigger the motion to vacate the chair and replace him.
It may be a group of GOP House moderates two years from now, or it may be Speaker McCarthy two months from now, but the hard reality is that some House Republicans may have to risk their jobs to avoid economic default.
