How a little-used tactic led to McCain’s legislative win
House Republican backers of immigration reform on Wednesday launched a little-used tactic that 16 years ago was central to one of Sen. John McCain’s greatest legislative triumphs.
The GOP group has filed a “discharge petition” to try to force House floor voters on four bills in hopes of permanently protecting “dreamers” — the undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children — from deportation.
They need 218 lawmakers to sign the petition to get around House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and the relevant committee chairmen.
Congress has been struggling to find a legislative solution to the immigration status of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors after President Donald Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Former President Ba- rack Obama created the program in 2012 via executive action to temporarily protect so-called dreamers from deportation.
Discharge petitions are seldom used, and are even more rarely successful, but one was used to get around then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, to help McCain’s signature campaign-finance-reform legislation break through and get a House vote.
McCain, R-Arizona, introduced the Senate version of the bipartisan bill to crack down on unregulated “soft money” contributions to political parties and limit corporate and labor-union spending on political advertising with his colleague Sen. Russell Feingold, DWisconsin.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 is still known as McCain-Feingold after its Senate champions. In the House of Representatives, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Connecticut, and Marty Meehan, D-Massachusetts, introduced a companion bill.
Hastert and other House Republican leaders opposed McCain-Feingold, and supporters deployed a discharge petition to break through in the House. The petition was filed on July 30, 2001, and was able to get the needed 218 signatures. The House passed the bill in February 2002.
After final approval from the Democrat-controlled Senate, then-President George W. Bush signed the legislation into law on March 27, 2002.
“I believe that this legislation, although far from perfect, will improve the current financing system for Federal campaigns,” Bush said in a written statement at the time.
In retrospect, the legacy of McCainFeingold is checkered. The Supreme Court overturned key parts of the law. Critics blame it for the proliferation of unaccountable, big-spending outside groupsinfluencing electionsand for weakening political parties, which enabled the rise of Donald Trump as an outsider candidate in the 2016 election.
In his forthcoming memoir, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations,“McCain writes that a discharge petition could help force a vote on long-stalled comprehensive immigration reform in the GOP-controlled House “as happened with McCain-Feingold.”
A 2013 bipartisan immigration bill backed by McCain passed the Senate but went nowhere in the Republicanrun House.
As of Wednesday, at least 15 Republicans had signed the new immigration discharge petition; 25 are needed, assuming all 193 House Democrats also sign the petition as expected.
A House discharge petition has been successfully used only once since the campaign-finance-reform episode: In 2015, to force a vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank.