Saying what we mean about ICE

Everyone is pretty sour toward Democratic Party leadership and “the establishment” right now, but I think it’s worth noting that Hakeem Jeffries has done an impressive job in the least powerful of the four congressional leadership posts.

That starts with the basic reality that the job of the minority is to win the majority, and he is the odds-on favorite to accomplish that. It’s true that House Democrats face a more favorable map than Senate Democrats. But this is not entirely out of the hands of leaders. Last summer, it was thought that Republicans would manage to use unusual intra-census redistricting to score themselves a potent gerrymandering advantage, but Democrats successfully blocked and countered that effort with Jeffries leading the way. House Democrats also got an Epstein files bill passed via discharge petition, and then got a health-care bill passed the same way.

If you’re not super-familiar with how Congress works, this may not seem like a big deal. But for essentially my entire career it’s been understood that the discharge petition, though theoretically available as an option, is in practice a dead letter.

The way the House works is that the majority party controls the floor, and if the speaker doesn’t want something to come up for a vote, it doesn’t come up for a vote.

But one reason that this party cartel dynamic holds firm is that it benefits frontline members. Any kind of “wedge issue” that generates bad politics for the majority party’s frontliners is kept off the floor. If you want to engage in gestures of rhetorical moderation, that’s a freebie because there’s no actual vote. But once the Epstein discharge petition passed, that created a new expectation that discharge petitions can be used. That generated pressure on frontline Republicans to do a health-care discharge petition in response to the unpopularity of the G.O.P. stance on health care. And now that that discharge petition has passed, it’s valid to raise the discharge question on basically any issue that’s inconvenient for Republican frontliners. Speaker Mike Johnson is facing a serious collapse of party cartel discipline.

And that health-care vote reflects the fact that Jeffries’s strategy of focusing a government shutdown on the A.C.A. subsidies issue basically worked.

This was a bit of