With Rules maneuver, House GOP aims to kill parental proxy push

WASHINGTON — A bitter intraparty dispute came to a head Tuesday as Republican members of the House Rules Committee, with the support of Speaker Mike Johnson, worked to shut down an effort to allow proxy voting for new parents in the House.

Tension had been building for weeks, as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., led a push to circumvent leadership and force the issue. Proxy voting would let new moms recover after birth while still doing their jobs, Luna said, while Johnson, R-La., sees it as a slippery and unconstitutional slope.

A majority of House members, including a dozen Republicans, signed on to Luna’s discharge petition. But leadership sought to reexert control Tuesday, relying on the Rules Committee to insert language into a rule for unrelated bills.

The language would table the proxy voting legislation and block any similar resolution from being brought again. Attaching the language to a rule for some of the party’s priorities, including a bill that would require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, puts Republicans in a tough position.

Luna blasted her party’s handling of the issue and on Monday suggested she would be willing to vote against such a rule on the floor, though it wasn’t clear how many GOP colleagues felt the same.

“There is clearly support for allowing young moms and families in Washington to have a voice,” Luna told reporters.

The Rules Committee maneuver seemed on shaky ground Monday night after Republicans abruptly adjourned the hearing without taking action and announced they would reconvene Tuesday at 8 a.m. Panel Democrats waited for nearly an hour after the scheduled start time before GOP committee members eventually emerged from a side room and read language for the rule.

“This rule is unprecedented. Never, never in the history of the House has the Rules Committee acted to just outright kill a discharge petition that was already signed by a majority of the House,” said Rules ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who introduced an amendment to strike the proxy voting block. The amendment was rejected.

The committee ultimately voted along party lines to approve the rule on Tuesday. If adopted by the House, it would effectively quash the discharge petition and head off further attempts.

The fallout has extended beyond the Rules hearing room to the House Freedom Caucus, with Luna renouncing her membership in the hard-right caucus. According to Luna, some of her fellow Freedom Caucus members had threatened to shut down the floor if Johnson allowed the proxy discharge petition to be considered, a move she considered to be a betrayal of both her and the values of the group.

Luna is part of a small number of members who have given birth while serving in Congress. Another is Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., who introduced the bipartisan resolution that Luna hoped to bring up. It would allow recent mothers and fathers to designate a colleague to serve as their proxy and vote on their behalf for up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child. Pettersen had her second child on Jan. 25 and traveled with her newborn to attend some House votes earlier this year.

Luna introduced the discharge petition in March and quickly garnered the requisite 218 signatures that would allow a supporter to bring it to the floor over the objections of leadership.That set off a scramble among GOP leaders behind the scenes to stop that from happening.

Republicans attacked Luna’s effort from various angles, accusing her of disloyalty for joining with Democrats to support the proxy voting proposal. Rules Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., in an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner on Friday, called discharge petitions a “tactic of the minority.”

“Discharge petitions … have never been, nor ever will be, viable avenues to secure any manner of conservative wins when we are in the majority,” Foxx wrote.

‘A scam’

Democrats on the Rules Committee blasted the procedural maneuvering during their meeting Monday night, with McGovern calling it a “scam.”

“I’m just puzzled … We already gave it a rule,” McGovern said of the voting citizenship bill, which was included in the overall rules package for the 119th Congress as a high-priority item. “So, I mean, this is kind of like … a scam to derail a discharge petition.”

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.

Though the proposal led by Luna and Pettersen creates a narrow carve-out for parents, many Republicans have argued that it could lead to broader proxy voting.

“It’s a slippery slope. I get that if you’re expecting and having a child, you want to be here, but that’s your choice,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the Freedom Caucus, before entering the Rules hearing room on Monday afternoon. “When you enter Congress, you enter it to serve, and I don’t know where you stop it.”

In several lawsuits, Republicans argued that proxy voting 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.

But many are still not on board, and at least one who signed the discharge petition has now withdrawn his support. “I wish I wouldn’t have signed on to the discharge petition, but I did,” Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said last week.

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., another original supporter of the discharge petition, said he supported proxy voting for parents in theory but wouldn’t commit to voting against the rule on the floor.

“I’ve not voted against a rule, even though I know sometimes people would assume that I have. I have not. So we’ll see what happens in the rules package,” Donalds said Monday. “This is why I think we’re making this more into an issue than it needs to be, in my opinion. But the leadership and other members haven’t asked my opinion.”

Luna, meanwhile, alleged that Republicans opponents of proxy voting had used intimidation and other tactics in private — like offering choice committee assignments or floor consideration for bills — to chip away at support.

The tension also led to some heated public exchanges. On Friday, Luna and fellow Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy, R-Texas, had words on the social media platform X.

“Respectfully to my friend – this (unconstitutional) rule would ultimately NOT be limited to moms,” wrote Roy, who led the election bill included in the rule. “Cancer patients, dads, & worst of all, people who lazily abuse it (eg, voting from boats). She leaves out her discharge allows no amendments! We should show up to work/vote.”

“If I was your friend you wouldn’t be sticking a clause to kill the discharge petition in the same rule as a voter integrity bill,” Luna responded. “You are trying to paint me as someone who doesn’t support election integrity. You have become what you hated.”