In a rebuke of House leadership, a small group of Republicans on Tuesday joined Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to reject a rule on the House floor and clear the way for a renewed effort to allow recent parents to vote by proxy.
“Today is a pretty historical day for the entire conference,” the Florida Republican said immediately following the vote. “It’s showing that the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington.”
Asked about her message to GOP leadership, Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., said, “Don’t f— with moms.”
The proxy proposal, introduced earlier this year by Pettersen, would allow mothers and fathers to designate a colleague to vote on their behalf for up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child. Luna filed a discharge petition for the resolution in March and quickly hit the 218 threshold needed to force a vote on the House floor over the objections of leadership.
The House GOP, in response, attempted a procedural takedown of the discharge petition, slipping language into an unrelated rule setting up floor votes on conservative priorities, including a controversial election bill backed by President Donald Trump. The language would have tabled the proxy voting discharge petition and warded off future attempts to create a proxy carveout for new moms and dads.
But eight Republicans joined Luna and all 213 Democrats in voting against the rule, scuttling the House GOP’s plan.
“Speaker Johnson pulled out all the stops and people continued to stand with us,” Pettersen said, standing beside Luna on the House steps and holding her 9-week-old son, Sam. “We’re changing the way that Congress works, making sure that moms and parents have a voice.”
“If we don’t do the right thing now, it’ll never be done,” Luna said on the floor.
Earlier in the day, the Florida Republican gave notice of her intent to start the discharge process, which starts a clock ticking. Now the resolution must be considered within two legislative days.
House leaders quickly moved to cancel votes for the rest of the week, buying time to regroup and consider any remaining strategies to block the proxy momentum.
The Republicans who joined Luna in breaking ranks on Tuesday included Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Nick LaLota of New York, Greg Steube of Florida, Max Miller of Ohio, Kevin Kiley of California, Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, and Mike Lawler of New York. Lawler and Van Drew were early backers of the parental proxy resolution.
Tension had been building for weeks, as Luna argued that proxy voting would let new moms recover after birth while still doing their jobs, while Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., dismissed it as a slippery and unconstitutional slope.
Following the vote, Johnson called the opposition to the rule “very disappointing.”
“That rule being brought down means that we can’t have any further action on the floor this week. That means we will not be voting on the SAVE Act, for election integrity. We will not be voting on the rogue judges who are attacking President Trump’s agenda. We will not be taking down these terrible Biden policies with the CRA votes,” Johnson said, naming the other pieces of legislation that were included in the rule. “All that was just wiped off the table.”
The election legislation, however, is one of 12 bills Republicans teed up for expedited consideration in the Rules package it adopted at the beginning of this Congress, meaning it could be brought to the floor without going back through the Rules Committee.
“We’ll regroup and come back and we’ll have to do this again,” Johnson said, signaling leadership isn’t throwing in the towel.
The fallout has extended to the House Freedom Caucus, with Luna renouncing her membership. According to Luna, some of her colleagues in the hard-right faction had threatened to shut down the floor if Johnson allowed the proxy discharge effort to be considered, a move she saw as a betrayal.
Luna and Pettersen are part of a small number of members who have given birth while serving in Congress.
“We have a long ways to go to make this place accessible for young families like mine,” said Pettersen from the floor, describing the “impossible decision” she made between showing up in Washington to represent her constituents and caring for her newborn at home. As she spoke, she cradled her son as he fussed and whimpered.
Republican pushback
Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy, R-Texas, hit back against the idea that new parents in Congress should get special treatment.
“I’m a dad. My daughter, my son, they ask me to show up to things. I missed my son’s 4-H presentation last week,” Roy said on the floor. “My wife carries the burden of making sure our family can function back home in Texas. But you know what? I signed up for the job.”
Others accused Luna of disloyalty for working with Democrats on the proxy voting proposal and resorting to a discharge petition, a “tactic of the minority,” to overcome the objections of her own party’s leaders.
“Discharge petitions … have never been, nor ever will be, viable avenues to secure any manner of conservative wins when we are in the majority,” wrote Rules Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., in an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner on Friday.
The procedural effort to block the discharge petition began Monday night in the Rules Committee, though it seemed on shaky ground after Republicans abruptly recessed the hearing without taking action and announced they would reconvene Tuesday morning. When they did, an hour late, they unveiled the rule that would have set up floor action on the unrelated legislation while also effectively killing the proxy push.
Rules ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., described the insertion as a “scam” meant to force rank-and-file Republicans to choose between falling in line between GOP priorities and supporting Luna’s parental proposal.
“I’m just puzzled … We already gave it a rule,” McGovern said of the election bill, referring to its fast-track inclusion in the overall rules package for the 119th Congress. “So, I mean, this is kind of like … a scam to derail a discharge petition.”
The uproar over the procedural move drew some attention away from what House Republicans hope will be a signature bill, one that would require people to produce proof of citizenship before they could register to vote in federal elections.
Republican opposition to proxy voting extends back to the pandemic, when the Democrat-controlled House allowed the practice as a safety precaution. Democrats and Republicans — including Johnson — voted by proxy in large numbers, raising concerns that it was being abused.
In lawsuits, Republicans had argued the practice was unconstitutional, in part because they say it violates the Constitution’s Quorum Clause.
The resolution introduced by Pettersen and supported by Luna specifically states that proxy votes wouldn’t count toward establishing a quorum, in an effort to appease Republican detractors, Luna said.
As the vote on the rule Tuesday closed, delivering a setback to Johnson and keeping the proxy voting push alive, Pettersen stood near the front of the chamber holding her son. Cheers erupted from the Democratic side, and Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., reached over to hug her.
Van Drew, who was one of a dozen GOP supporters of the discharge petition, called the proxy voting measure “pro-women, pro-life, pro-family, pro-child.”
“We don’t have hundreds of pregnant women,” the New Jersey Republican said. “So now and then, a woman gets pregnant and then gives birth, wants to spend a little special time with her newborn baby, there’s nothing wrong with that… I mean, it’s the 21st century.”
Aidan Quigley contributed to this report.
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