December 17, 2025
A handful of House Republicans just said screw Speaker Mike Johnson and they sided with Democrats to force a vote in the House to extend those expiring affordable care act healthcare subsidies. But in the end – will those few Republicans be enough to save about 24 million people from seeing their health insurance skyrocket on January 1st? The short answer is – probably not and those millions of people who get health insurance through the a-c-a are probably either going to lose their health coverage all together because it’s just too expensive or they’re going to be forced to pay 30, 50, 150% more for their premiums in just a few days.
So here’s what’s going on – this morning four Republicans, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick Ryan Mackenzie and Rob Bresnahan from Pennsylvania and Mike Lawker from New York joined all the Democrats to sign on to yet another discharge petition. That petition now has 218 signatures. This discharge petition was created by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and it simply would extend those ACA subsidies for three more years. Now – there’s a really clear political calculation these four Republicans are making by joining the Democrats. First – you need to understand that House Speaker Mike Johnson has very publicly refused to even consider legislation to extend those ACA subsidies. And one of the perks of being Speaker is – if you get to decide what bills come up for a vote and which ones do not. He’s saying “no” to any bill that would extend ACA premiums subsidies because the more conservative wing of the Republican party and President Trump hate the ACA and want to see it die. Last night – Johnson made the final decision that he would not consider the more moderate Republicans request to extend those subsidies. And when Johnson said no last night – these four Republicans felt that they had no other choice but to go against their own leadership and join the Democrats. They say they are taking that extraordinary step because they’re representing their constituents who are demanding these subsidies get extended. It just so happens that their constituents also voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and we are about to enter a midterm year – so even if this discharge petition fails, they can say to those constituents while campaigning next year– and say — see??? I was fighting on your behalf – but it just didn’t work. We’ll see if that’s going to be enough for them to keep their jobs after the midterm.
Now let’s talk about whether this discharge petition can actually pass the House. First – I want to see how rarely discharge petitions get enough signatures to override the house speaker. Before this year – it almost never happened. And this year we’ve now seen two successful discharge petitions. This one and the one that forced the vote on the Epstein file release. But as for this one – and whether it’ll be successful — we likely won’t know until January. That’s because the House rules say once the discharge petition reaches the required 218 signatures, the House Speaker has 7 legislative days to put it on the floor for a vote. The House is scheduled to recess for the holiday break tomorrow. So it’s up to Speaker Johnson – he can decide to put it on the floor today if he wants – or he can decide to slow walk this. And it looks like he’s going to slow walk it – meaning – we’re not going to see a vote on this discharge petition until congress returns to work after the holidays in January.
And here’s the thing – even if this discharge petition does get enough votes to pass in the house – it would still have to go to the Senate – and it would need 60 votes there. And as I reported in this video last week – a very similar attempt to extend the ACA subsidies by three years failed. So it’s likely this one – if it gets there — will fail too.
