House Speaker Mike Johnson is still smarting from his failed attempt to stop the Epstein files bill from gliding through Congress this week. Now he’s turning his frustration toward something bigger: the very mechanism that let lawmakers blow past him in the first place.

According to Axios, Johnson is weighing ways to rein in House discharge petitions—the procedural escape hatch that lets a simple majority force a bill to the floor when leadership refuses to act. How he’d pull that off is unclear, but the instinct alone says plenty about where his head is.

On Wednesday night, Johnson griped to Axios that discharge petitions have become “too common” and said he’s considering tightening the rules to make them harder to use.

A discharge petition has always been a kind of legislative Hail Ma

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