WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two women House lawmakers have officially mounted their push to make it easier for new parents to vote and serve in Congress. 

Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, a Democrat, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, are teaming up on a resolution to allow new parents to represent their constituents by designating another member to vote for them, commonly known as proxy voting, for 12 weeks after welcoming a child. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson did not include the measure in the rules package for the new Congress in January and later released a statement stating he believes proxy voting is unconstitutional. Pettersen and Luna are aiming to circumvent House leaders with a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition, filed by Luna on Monday, to put it to a vote. 

House leadership, specifically the House Rules Committee, controls what legislation makes it to the House floor. Luna and Pettersen are invoking the procedural maneuver to get their resolution out of the Rules panel and straight to the House floor for a vote. 

“There’s a lot of support for this — it makes sense,” Pettersen told The 19th on Monday. “The discharge petition exists [because] if the speaker stops something that’s very popular from coming to the floor, we have the opportunity to force a vote. I’m hopeful that there’s a path.”

On the first day of voting, the petition garnered 92 signatures, including six from Republicans. The petition needs 218 signatures to force a vote.

Historically, discharge petitions have rarely been successful, in part because they require a majority of House members to sign on. Luna and Pettersen expect widespread support from Democrats for the measure, meaning that in the narrowly divided House, they need just a handful of Republicans to sign on. 

Pettersen had to stop traveling to Washington in mid-January due to her pregnancy. She gave birth in late January and returned to Congress a month later with her newborn son, Sam, to vote against a Republican blueprint for a sweeping tax, energy and spending package.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t given the opportunity to vote remotely after giving birth,” she said on the House floor, holding Sam. “But I wasn’t going to let that stop me from being here to represent my constituents and vote no on this disastrous Republican budget proposal.”   

Off the House floor, Pettersen told The 19th that she “didn’t want to miss a moment that I could make a difference.”

“There was a point at which I didn’t know if I was going to be showing up in my pajamas with a suit jacket, because he wanted to be held,” she said. “I made, literally the night before I left, the final decision to bring him. I just couldn’t leave him.”

Luna in 2023 was advised by doctors not to travel while she was recovering from a difficult birth. In a January video statement, she called not being allowed to vote by proxy while recovering a “slap in the face to every constituent” who elected her to Congress. 

Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California and Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York have signed on to the measure as cosponsors, lending it bipartisan support. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, House members could designate another member to vote on their behalf. Members of both parties made regular use of proxy voting, but some Republicans, led by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sued to end its use, calling it unconstitutional. Federal courts rejected those arguments, but McCarthy formally ended the practice when Republicans won back control of the House in 2022.  

“I have great sympathy, empathy for all of our young women legislators who are of birthing age. It’s a real quandary,” Johnson said in a January statement. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t fit with the language of the Constitution, and that’s the inescapable truth that we have.” 

It was nearly 130 years after the drafting of the Constitution that Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress in 1916, three years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, a right that was still restricted for many women of color. It wasn’t until 1973 that Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first member of Congress to give birth in office.

In an interview in January, Pettersen said the lack of accommodations for new parents reflects a lack of willingness on the part of institutions to evolve with the times. Pettersen gave birth to her first child while she was serving in the Colorado legislature and needed to get permission from leadership to go on leave and classify her leave as being for a “chronic illness” to get paid. She introduced legislation granting Colorado lawmakers 12 weeks of paid parental leave that passed in 2022.