House Moderates Take ACA Subsidy Matters Into Their Own Hands With a Discharge Petition

A bipartisan group of House moderates officially filed a discharge petition on Wednesday to force a vote on a bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year.

The decision from the group to press forward came hours after Speaker Mike Johnson presented a list of 10 options to Republican lawmakers to address health care costs — and extending the ACA tax credits was not one of them.

“It was clear that, given the timeframe and given some of the differences within our conference on particular issues, that a bill was not going to be put forward,” moderate GOP Rep. Mike Lawler told reporters.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican moderate who led the discharge petition, said that there are “a lot” of House Republicans “who have represented a lot of lower to middle income earning constituents who are quietly very supportive of this.”

When asked whether they expect Republican leadership to support the measure, Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, who worked alongside Fitzpatrick, responded: “Go ask them, but I think they ought to.”

Fitzpatrick, Lawler and Golden were seen on the House floor huddling with Johnson during a key procedural vote for a separate bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. The conversation looked tense at times and led to the lawmakers’ introduction of their discharge petition to force a vote on the tax credits.

This bipartisan effort — which currently has eight signatures — is separate from House Democratic leadership’s discharge petition, which looks to force a vote on a measure to have a clean extension of the ACA subsidies for three years. Fitzpatrick’s bill would extend the subsidies for two years and would impose some reforms, like income caps.

Johnson told reporters last week he would put forward a proposal to extend the ACA tax credits as many in his party have been pushing for. Expiration of the credits, implemented by the Biden administration amid the COVID pandemic, would lead to huge premium spikes for millions of Americans.

Johnson suggested he was not interested in figuring out a bipartisan solution in a press conference Wednesday.

“You cannot be an arsonist and a firefighter at the same time. That’s the message for the Democrats,” Johnson said. “They have no desire to fix the broken system they created. They just want to subsidize it.”

Fitzpatrick told reporters that the White House knows “about what we are doing.”

When asked if this effort had support from the executive branch, the Pennsylvania congressman said, “I personally think that most people over there, yes, but they’re not speaking on behalf of the president.”

“Every member, regardless of party, needs to ask themselves a question: Are these expiring subsidies going to hurt their constituents?” Fitzpatrick said. “If the answer is yes, then if they’re doing their job, they’re going to sign this petition, put this on the floor and get it over to the Senate. It’s that simple.”

Rep. Don Bacon, another moderate Republican, summed up why the group chose to introduce a discharge petition in the first place.

“We know we need a temporary extension of these tax credits, with reforms,” Bacon told reporters. “But we’re not going to do serious changes to ACA in the next two or three weeks, so we just felt like since there doesn’t seem to be any impetus to do this, we’re going to try to force the issue.”

As for whether or not Bacon thinks leadership will support the effort: “Probably not. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”