Discharge Petition - Versions Other Than The U.S. House

Versions Other Than The U.S. House

Versions of the discharge petition vary widely in U.S. state legislatures. Some use petitions like the House, though others allow a motion to be made to discharge the committee, forcing legislators to vote. The threshold for discharge also varies. For instance, Wisconsin has similar rules to the House; a simple majority is required to succeed, though a motion or a petition are both acceptable. The Kansas Legislature requires 56-percent approval (70 members). Pennsylvania allowed only 30 percent of its members to recall a measure from committee for a time. This was changed in 1925 to a majority, drastically curtailing the number of recalls; still, only 25 (about 10 percent) petition-signers are required to force a motion to be voted on by the floor. Though technically a vote on whether the bill can proceed, the bill's supporters usually claimed that the vote was a vote on the bill itself, providing opportunities to the minority party to, at the least, force the majority party to be put on record as opposing a popular bill.

Both the House and the Senate have created an expedited process for Congressional review of executive branch regulations (often used against "midnight regulations"), providing an especially quick timetable for consideration of a joint resolution to overturn a particular regulation. As part of this process, Senators may use a "discharge petition" to discharge a Senate committee from consideration of the disapproval resolution. While using the same term as the House process, its use in the United States Senate has few similarities to the House process described above and is limited only to disapproval resolutions created under the conditions of this congressional review process. There also exists a "discharge resolution" in which non-controversial measures do not have to go through committee and are submitted to a voice vote. Discharge resolutions, however, must be unanimous and are related loosely at best to discharge petitions.

Analogs to the discharge petition in parliamentary systems are rare. In such systems the Prime Minister often has even more control over the agenda than the Speaker of the House does in the United States. The closest parallel may be a "conscience vote" (sometimes referred to as a "free vote"), in which members are released from party ties and allowed to vote as they wish on especially controversial issues.