Thanks, Obamacare! Mike Johnson gets humiliated—again

The House will be voting on a three-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, after four House Republicans defied Speaker Mike Johnson and joined Democrats to force a vote on a bill to extend expanded ACA tax credits for three years.

The successful discharge petition—which will force Johnson to put Democrats’ three-year subsidy extension bill up for a vote—is a major win for House Democrats, who have been working to extend the ACA tax credits to avoid millions of Americans seeing their premiums more than double next year.

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In her interview, Wiles is equally unsparing toward Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, calling him “a right-wing absolute zealot.” 

Vanity Fair notes that Vought was the “architect of the notorious Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation-backed blueprint to radically reshape the federal government.

And it's also a major loss for Johnson, who has now failed multiple times to keep control of his conference—most notably his embarrassing failure at blocking the release of the Epstein files.

Johnson on Wednesday whined about the Democrats’ discharge petition's success.

"I lament how this turned out in the end," Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill after the petition gained the 218 signatures needed to force a vote, when GOP Reps. MIke Lawler of New York and Brian Fitzpatrick, Rob Bresnahan, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania defied Johnson and signed the petition.

Johnson, however, put himself in this position by refusing to hold a vote on an amendment a group of vulnerable House Republicans' offered, which would have extended ACA subsidies for a shorter amount of time.

"We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve, and it just was not to be," Johnson said Tuesday.

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Johnson claimed he blocked that amendment because it did not include offsets, a ridiculous demand given that Republicans did not offset their massive tax cuts in the "One Big Beautiful Bill."

And Republican lawmakers called Johnson out for lying.

"I prepared precisely the amendment the Speaker is describing, and he said it would be ruled out of order," Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) wrote in a post on X, refuting Johnson's excuse

The fact that Johnson has lost control of the House floor yet again is leading Republicans to privately muse about Johnson's future.

"If this isn’t an indictment of the Speaker, I don’t know what is. He has failed this institution and his members," an unnamed House Republican told Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman.

Ultimately, however, it's still unlikely the Obamacare subsidies will be extended. An identical three-year extension of the tax credits that help millions afford their Obamacare plans failed in the Senate just last week.

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune refused to say if he'd even bring the House bill up for a vote if it succeeds.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Thune told reporters.

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