Sarah McCammon / Tamara Keith / Domenico Montanaro (primary hosts; multi-voice label primarily Sarah McCammon)

And on Wednesday, they got the 218th signature on that discharge petition.

What that does is it locks it in.

It says now there must be a House vote on the discharge petition.

Well, right before they got that 218th signature, the White House invited Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a Republican, over to the Situation Room.

The Situation Room being the room where secure, significant conversations related to national security have happened.

This is not an invitation to the White House for tea.

This is not.

And so they met in the Situation Room.

And it appears that it was an effort to get Lauren Boebert to withdraw her signature before it got to 218.

Well, she didn't withdraw her signature.

Now it's locked.

That vote is now set to happen next week.

And it seems quite likely that it isn't just going to be a few renegade Republicans voting for it, but it could end up being a large number of Republicans in Congress who ultimately support this bill.

Isn't House Speaker Mike Johnson pushing back a little bit, though?

Well, he was for quite a while.

By keeping the House out of session, he didn't swear in a Democratic congresswoman who had been elected in a special election, Adelita Grijalva.

He didn't swear her in.

As a result, they didn't have that 218th signature until he did swear her in this Wednesday.

And that's when this all happened.

But once it became clear that this discharge petition was