What The Hell America!

House Republican leaders are attempting to quash a bipartisan push to make serving in Congress easier for new parents. 

Republicans on the House Rules Committee on Tuesday voted for a measure that, if passed by the full House, would kill a resolution sponsored by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, and Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, a Democrat, to allow new parents in the House to designate another member to vote for them for 12 weeks after welcoming a child or before birth if health circumstances limit a member’s ability to travel. They attempted to circumvent House leadership by using a rarely successful move known as a discharge petition, which gained the support of half of the members of the chamber. 

Republicans voted to include a provision to kill the discharge petition as part of a package of bills including the SAVE Act, an unrelated GOP-backed bill supporters say would stop illegal noncitizen voting, which is already unlawful. The full House is set to vote on the rule for the SAVE Act and other bills later Tuesday. 

The move is meant to pressure Luna and other Republicans to abandon her discharge petition. “They’re basically putting a gun to her head,” Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York said Monday. 

Luna told reporters Monday evening that she would oppose the rule for the SAVE Act if it would kill her petition. 

“They are trying to paint me as someone that does not support election integrity,” she said. “You guys can pull my voting record, I’m one of the top 10 most conservative members of Congress, so it’s just ridiculous to me that they would even do that.” 

Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Republican chair of the Rules Committee, argued Tuesday that  allowing proxy voting would hurt the integrity of Congress. 

“According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Congress is defined as ‘the act of coming together and meeting,’” she said. “I’ve never voted by proxy because I believe it undermines the fabric of that sacred act of convening. I know there’s a new laptop class in America that seems to operate increasingly in a virtual space, but that’s simply not a fact of life for most of American workers.” 

Democrats on the committee decried the attempt to block the proxy voting petition as an anti-democratic power play by leadership to thwart the will of the majority. 

“This rule is unprecedented. Never in the history of the House has the Rules Committee acted to outright kill a discharge petition that was already signed by a majority of the House,” said Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the committee. “So you’re making history.” 

“This is not only unprecedented, this is shameful,” McGovern added. 

Both Luna and Pettersen, who are among only a handful of House members who have given birth in office, missed votes after having their children. With Reps. Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, and Sara Jacobs of California, a Democrat, they teamed up on a resolution to allow proxy voting for new parents. Proxy voting was widely used by members of both political parties during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Republicans sued to stop the practice and ended it altogether when they took back control of the U.S. House in 2023.  

House Speaker Mike Johnson and House GOP leadership have vigorously opposed the proxy voting effort, arguing that the practice would be unconstitutional, concerns Luna and Pettersen say they have neutralized with their resolution’s language.

“We sympathize with our colleagues who face circumstances that prevent them from being present, but proxy voting raises serious constitutional questions,” House Republican leaders said in a statement last week. “It also changes more than two and a half centuries of tradition, abuses the system, and creates the risk of a slippery slope toward more and more members casting votes remotely.”

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.

Luna and Pettersen utilized a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition to circumvent House leadership and the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what items of legislation make it to the House floor. Discharge petitions have, historically, rarely been successful because they require signatures from a majority of House members. Their discharge petition received signatures from 218 members, including 11 Republicans, setting it up for a vote on the House floor, where it would need a simple majority to pass.  

Johnson and GOP leaders sought to find a way to derail the petition from making it to the floor, including meeting with Luna late last week in hopes of persuading her to back down and pull the resolution. But Luna remained steadfast in support of it getting to the floor, leading leadership to turn to the Rules Committee.  

The discharge petition has also caused friction within the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of hardline conservatives of which Luna was a member. Luna announced Monday her departure from the caucus. In a letter to her Republican colleagues, she charged that Johnson, who is presiding over a razor-thin majority in the House, was being “blackmailed” by fellow Freedom Caucus members who oppose proxy voting.

“Supporting female representation and new families is not a fringe issue — it is a cornerstone of a vibrant, representative Congress,” she wrote.