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.
The Signature That Isn’t There
Every Democrat has signed. All of them. That does not happen. Ask anyone who has tried to get 213 Democrats to agree on lunch.
Three Republicans have signed with them. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
So the math is finished and it is simple and it is cruel. There is one line left in that book, and it can only be filled by a Republican. Not by an argument, not by a rally, not by a poll showing seven in ten Americans on Garcia’s side. By one member of the GOP majority walking down the steps in front of the cameras and the whip team and picking up the pen.
A Speaker Signing Away His Own House
Discharge Petition No. 25. Twenty-five. There were Congresses that went whole terms without one succeeding at all, because a discharge petition is what members do when the Speaker will not give them a vote, and Speakers used to be able to stop that.
This Congress has moved more of them to the floor than any in modern memory — seven, so far — and every one of them is a note slipped under Johnson’s door telling him his own conference has stopped waiting on him.
Johnson runs a House that no longer runs on him. He has handed away the money power, the war power, the oversight power, one piece at a time, to a White House he has never once found the nerve to tell no.
The Constitution gave Congress the job of checking the other two branches. Johnson gave the job to President Donald Trump. What is left for the rank and file is the clerk’s book in the well — the procedural back stairs, the workaround, the thing members reach for when the front door is bolted from the inside by a Speaker who does not own the lock.
Ten Years of Coming Up Short
The Dream and Promise Act is not new. It is old the way a debt is old.
People have been carrying this bill for more than a decade — good people, some of them staffers who were 24 when they started and are 38 now, some of them the young immigrants themselves, who came to this Capitol as college kids and now bring their own children to the meetings. It has passed the House before. It has been promised in State of the Union addresses. It has been traded away in three separate grand bargains. It has never become law.
It may not this time either. Two hundred seventeen is a hell of a number and it is still not the number.
“The Things He Needs to Do”
Say it gets the 218th. Say it passes the House. It lands in a Senate whose floor is controlled by Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., a quiet man with a hard record on immigration.
In January, 2025, just after Trump’s second inauguration, I asked Thune directly: “President Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to help immigrants with DACA, or the Dreamers. What’s the Senate Republican plan to deliver for President Trump?”
Thune pivoted to border security.
“But then I hope there’s an interest in doing something in a bipartisan way,” he said. “Obviously the president’s got significant interest in this issue, and it’s gonna take both sides sitting down in good faith to hammer out a solution. That would be a good long-term outcome. In the near term, he’s gotta do the things he needs to do to get the border secure.”
I asked whether “long-term” meant after budget reconciliation.
“A bipartisan initiative would have to be that way,” he said.
That was January. The reconciliation process came and went. The bipartisan initiative did not arrive.
The Pen at the Other End
And if the miracle holds — 218 in the well, passage on the floor, Thune finding the good faith he described — the bill goes to a desk in the Oval Office belonging to a man who has spent years telling audiences he loves the Dreamers and has spent this term letting Stephen Miller take them apart by the thousands.
Nothing Trump has done since January 2025 has been more thoroughly his than the deportations. Not the agencies he gutted. Not the departments he hollowed out. This one he chose, and he chose it every single day.
There is still one blank line in that book in the well of the House. Somebody in the majority walks down those steps this week, or nobody does.
Editor’s Note: I’ll be back on Capitol Hill tomorrow morning and throughout the month when the House is in session. I already have a list of names to ask about the Dream Act discharge petition. To support this shoe leather news work, consider subscribing to Migrant Insider —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwVaRPRkBCA
Maybe we can pray for deliverance thru a miracle never to be forgotten "last stand" vote by Senator John McCain -- Perhaps Representative Thomas Massie could make history in the same way. I would not put it past him despite his history of taking a strong inflexible stance on immigration. It would be brilliant and what does he owe any of them? Nothing -- I appreciate his handling of his exit. He appears to me to be an authentic and courageous well-tempered professional with strong boundaries but a passion for doing as much good as he can and staying on the right side of history.