WASHINGTON — They sign it by hand. That is the thing about a discharge petition that nobody outside this building ever remembers: there is no proxy, no app, no staffer sent down in a member’s place. You walk to the well of the House, you take the pen, and you write your name in a clerk’s book where anybody in America can go read it.
Two hundred seventeen members have now done that on Discharge Petition No. 25, Migrant Insider has learned. One more name and the American Dream and Promise Act gets a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Speaker Mike Johnson can do nothing about it but watch.
The petition belongs to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas. The bill is H.R. 1414. It would keep some undocumented people from being deported and give others a way to adjust their status — the kind of legislation that polls well in every district in this country and yet has died unceremoniously in every Congress that touches it.
