Don Wolfensberger at The Hill:
Those who think a discharge petition is an EZ-pass to resolving the debt crisis are driving against traffic. A few years ago, when I charted all the discharge petitions filed from the 90th to 115th Congresses (1967-2018), I found that, of the 321 petitions filed during that period, only 13 received a majority of signatures and made it onto the discharge calendar. Of those, only seven were called-up and only four were passed. I did not go on to chart their subsequent fate in the Senate, or at the White House. But it was, no doubt, bleak. To put it bluntly, discharge petitions rarely have a snow-ball’s chance in a certain hot spot of succeeding.