Rep. Don Bacon and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick are done waiting. After months of back-and-forth between the House, Senate, and White House that yielded little movement on Russia sanctions, the two House Republicans are preparing to go around their own leadership and force a floor vote.
Bacon told Fox News Digital that Fitzpatrick's sanctions bill "ripens" this coming week, meaning it can be submitted as a discharge petition as early as Monday or Tuesday. He acknowledged it "got to start from scratch" and will need 218 signatures, "so that has a lot more work to do."
A source familiar with the lawmakers' planning said they would give House GOP leaders "one last chance" to hold a vote on Russia sanctions voluntarily before the procedural bypass begins. The source also said Fitzpatrick was directly communicating with the White House regarding a House vote on the measure.
According to Fox News, Fitzpatrick introduced his bill in December, targeting the Russian Federation with sanctions if it refuses to negotiate a peace agreement with Ukraine or violates any existing peace agreement. The latest congressional record, dated Tuesday, shows that Fitzpatrick introduced a resolution to fast-track that bill to the floor.
A discharge petition is one of Congress's sharpest procedural tools, and one of its rarest. It forces a vote on legislation over the objections of House majority leadership, and it almost never succeeds because most members of the party in power are traditionally wary of crossing their leaders. It requires a full majority of the House: 218 signatures.
That makes this more than a policy disagreement. It is a structural challenge to how Speaker Johnson runs the floor.
Here is where the story gets revealing. Speaker Mike Johnson has said on multiple occasions that he supports sanctioning Russia but that any sanctions bill must originate in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said earlier this year that the process must start in the House.
Both chambers say they support sanctions. Both chambers say the other one should go first. The result is that neither chamber moves at all. Washington has perfected this trick: unanimous enthusiasm, zero action, and a convenient finger pointed across the Capitol rotunda.
The Trump administration has already imposed some sanctions on Russian entities, primarily targeting its vast oil and gas sector. Whether that is sufficient depends on whom you ask, but the fact that a bipartisan coalition in the House feels compelled to force a vote through extraordinary procedural means tells you something about the pace of the current approach.
Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, framed the debate in historical terms, invoking Churchill and Chamberlain. He told Fox News Digital:
We've got to know a bad guy when we see one, and Putin is a bad guy. He's made clear, it's not just about Ukraine. He wants to regain the rest of what the Soviet Union had.
That is a core piece of the hawkish conservative argument on Russia, and it carries weight whether you agree with the current diplomatic track or not. Putin's ambitions did not shrink when the war dragged on. They rarely do when the cost of expansion stays low.
Bacon also acknowledged the political realities working against the petition. He noted the slim House GOP majority and said he understands "the political realities that Mike Johnson is under." He conceded that it is "not normal for members of the majority to do a discharge petition" and that many colleagues "don't want to get in front of President Trump."
The Fitzpatrick petition is not the only procedural pressure campaign in play. Bacon and Fitzpatrick have also joined Democrats on a separate discharge petition for Ukraine aid, led by Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., which needs just one more GOP signature to force a vote.
Bacon sounded optimistic but acknowledged the timeline:
We've got one [Republican] on the fence, thinking about it, and we have one that wants to wait until the primary is done. So we're talking a month or two months.
He added: "I wish we had it tomorrow. Ukrainians are dying every day."
One Republican on the fence. One waiting out primary season. That is the margin between legislative action and continued paralysis.
Discharge petitions by members of the majority party are vanishingly rare for a reason. They represent a public declaration that leadership has failed to act. They embarrass the Speaker. They fracture caucus discipline. Most members would rather negotiate behind closed doors for months than sign one.
That Bacon and Fitzpatrick are willing to go this route, and to do it publicly, signals a level of frustration that private conversations clearly have not resolved. The "one last chance" framing from a source close to the lawmakers makes the ultimatum explicit.
Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick's office did not respond to requests for an interview, which suggests he is letting the procedural filings speak for themselves. The congressional record shows the resolution. The petition machinery is primed. The question now is whether Johnson acts before Fitzpatrick and Bacon force his hand.
The Senate side is no less tangled. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions targeting Russia's oil and gas sectors, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who leads the Senate sanctions effort, told Semafor that Congress was still waiting on a green light from the President.
So the House says the Senate should go first. The Senate says the House should go first. And the Senate's leading Democrat on the issue says everyone is waiting on the White House. Three branches of excuses, stacked neatly on top of one another.
Bacon and Fitzpatrick are trying to kick the bottom one out. Whether 218 of their colleagues have the spine to join them will tell us everything about where this Congress actually stands on Russia.
