A group of renegade House Republicans and Democrats deployed the same procedural trick used to force a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files to wrangle a vote on a measure to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) filed her discharge petition to force the vote on her legislation, a proposal that has been supported by an unexpected coterie of members ranging from progressives like liberal darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to archconservatives like Rep. Burchett (R-Tenn.).
“Hell’s frozen over,” Burchett told The Independent about the oddball coalition.
Under the rules of the House of Representatives, a member can file a discharge petition on legislation to force a vote on their legislation as a way to get around Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and hold a vote. Once the petition receives enough signatures, they are locked in.
Afterward, seven legislative days must pass. Then Johnson must designate a time and place for the vote.
Ocasio-Cortez expressed hope it could pass.
“I hope that everyone signs it and that we can get this done,” AOC told The Independent.
In recent years, stories of members of Congress trading stocks and potentially using information they are privvy to as lawmakers has raised the urgency level of the issue.
But under previous Speaker Nancy Pelosi, bipartisan legislation from Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and now Democratic Gov.-elect of Virginia Abigail Spanberger, languished. Many suspected that she opposed the legislation because of her husband Paul’s own trading.
Calls only increased after President Joe Biden called for a ban when he left office.
As Johnson has continued to make the House work in lockstep with President Donald Trump, members have taken to using the discharge petition more frequently.
Burchett said he expected Johnson to use procedural tricks.
“It’s just a game, just a game,” he told The Independent. “But I, you know, I think America wants us to pass this.”
Johnson and Luna clashed about the use of the discharge petition before. Earlier this year, Luna attempted to use the discharge petition to allow for new parents to vote by proxy. But Johnson effectively killed the measure due to conservatives arguing proxy voting was unconstitutional.
Last month, used the same trick to force a vote on legislation by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to release filed related to Epstein, the late convicted sex offender.
Massie said that more members using the procedure did not surprise him and compared his leadership to previous speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership.
“We made hundreds of things in order, and that way you could, if you were a rank and file member, at least through amendments and whatnot, you could show what the will of the house was on your particular issue,” Massie told The Independent.
“And under speaker Johnson, he’s really restricted how many votes we have on things and kept things from coming to the floor like the Epstein Transparency Act,” Massie said. “He just he should open the House up more and quit just being a rubber stamp for the President.”
It’s a sign of eroding trust with Johnson’s style of leadership ever since Trump returned to the White House. Johnson kept the House out of session for all of October and part of November during the government shutdown, which infuriated members.
He opposed efforts to hold a vote on the Epstein legislation. That frustration played a role in the decision by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to resign from Congress early.
But the legislation is not guaranteed to pass through the Senate. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) passed a similar bill through committee cheekily named the PELOSI Act.
That led to Trump raging against the bill and Hawley eventually having to smooth things out with the president.
