A group of House Republicans is making a rare move that would force a vote on a bill to reform aspects of Social Security, stirring unrest in the conference.
The bill at the heart of the push, also dubbed the Social Security Fairness Act, seeks to do away with the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), a proposal that backers on both sides of the aisle argue is long overdue.
The bill enjoys support from more than 100 House Republicans, and almost four dozen have cosigned the effort to use what’s known as a discharge petition to force consideration of the bill — and the strategy is rubbing some in the conference the wrong way.
“In a well-run Congress, no legislator signs a discharge petition if you’re a majority. That is a rule that is never broken,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told The Hill. “And the fact that 47 of my colleagues signed a discharge petition shows that we have an utter lack of discipline.”
While the maneuver is not uncommon in the House, it’s rarely successful, as members must gather at least 218 signatures to force a vote on legislation.
This discharge petition, led by Reps. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) — both of whom are not returning to the next Congress — is only the second such legislative effort that has met the threshold for sign-ons in the current congressional session.
“I’m a co-sponsor, I signed the discharge — and I was reluctant to, because I've never done it before when you're in the majority,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), one of more than 300 co-sponsors. “But I was talking to my firefighters and our policemen. I know how important it is to them, so I did it.”
Graves’s office says the bill seeks to prevent those who have worked in public service — including “police officers, firefighters, educators, and federal, state, and local government employees” — from seeing their Social Security benefits “unfairly” reduced.
But critics say the bill is expensive, pointing to scoring from the Congressional Budget Office from earlier this month that estimates the measure could cost upward of $190 billion over a decade.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) called the measure a “bad direction to go,” and said he would “oppose it.”
“I will support a version that I co-sponsor, which would be except $34 billion which we ought to pay for, but, but it's responsible. The one that ... they're discharging is irresponsible, and they can't defend it, and they won't defend it, except that they're going to say things like, 'We're going to make everybody whole.' They are not.”
Roy also took aim at others in his party over the procedural maneuver being deployed to move the legislation.
“Let me just say I chuckle a little bit at people who get a little upset that Chip voted against a rule once, and now they're freaking running a discharge petition,” said Roy, who has gotten flak from others in his conference in the past for helping tank rule votes in an effort to push leadership to take a harder line on spending.
“Let's go look at the list of appropriators in the list of, I don't know, members of the Rules Committee, who are now signing a discharge petition,” Roy said.
A House Republican who supports the bill but not the discharge petition and spoke freely on condition of anonymity, also took aim specifically at Graves over the push, saying: “I think obviously people who are on their way out of here wanted to force.”
“Process matters in the House. … Generally speaking, in the majority, you don't sign a discharge petition,” the Republican said, adding, “You want team players. People don't view it as a team player if you sign a discharge petition. That's why people are upset.”
The Hill has reached out to Graves’s office for comment.
Republicans say the matter was a topic of debate in a conference meeting earlier this week.
“They were debating about it. People said, ‘You shouldn't have done it.’ Other people said, ‘This is why we did it,’” Bacon said, adding that, at some point, Graves spoke in support of the vote.
“We’re at 300-plus [co-sponsors], and it's never been brought to the floor,” Bacon said before noting previous failed efforts to move the bill out of Congress. “So, the thought is … let's do it, and it’s an option for us, because that’s why they have the discharge petition. But normally, the majority doesn't do that.”
Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s (R-La.) office confirmed plans to bring the legislation up for consideration in November, after Congress returns from its October recess.
The push comes months after Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) garnered attention when his discharge petition for a disaster tax relief bill became the first in years to amass 218 signatures. And in the instances of the discharge petitions pushed by both Steube and Graves, Democrats have been key in reaching the sign-on goal.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who backed Steube’s push, said he’s “not really concerned” that Democratic support was essential to the petition’s success. “That's typical [of] what would happen when you're in the majority.”
“What I think it means is that the members want a bottom-up process here. They want just a process where they have an opportunity to represent their districts. And I think if a vote dies on the floor, a vote dies on the floor, then they have the ability to tell their voters that they really did everything that they could,” Donalds said. “But the old games of Capitol Hill, where the leadership controls everything, is just not going to work for the members that are coming to Capitol Hill these days.
“I just think the members aren't going to wait around for leadership to make a decision.”
Emily Brooks contributed.
