WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Tuesday voted to block a bipartisan push to allow lawmakers who are new parents to vote remotely rather than in person, officially ending a GOP standoff over an issue that had ground legislative business to a halt for the past week.
After President Donald Trump intervened in the intraparty spat late last week, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., who led the proxy voting push, struck a deal with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to allow new parents — as well as other members who are away from the Capitol for bereavement or other emergencies — to use a method called “vote pairing.”
This would essentially allow a member who is absent to “pair” their vote with someone who plans to vote on the other side of the issue. That person would vote “present,” and the congressional record would reflect the position of each member.
Another version of vote pairing would allow two absent members on opposite sides of an issue to have their official positions reflected in the official record even though they are unable to vote.
The vote-pairing provision was tucked in a rule package that the House passed on Tuesday afternoon to advance their bills for the week. That same rule also tables the original proxy voting proposal written by Luna and Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., who gave birth to a son in January and has brought him on the House floor for critical votes, including on Tuesday. Johnson, his leadership team and many conservative lawmakers had opposed the resolution, slamming it as “unconstitutional.”
Pettersen and Luna, who gave birth to her first child in 2023, rallied bipartisan support. The duo collected 218 signatures — a majority of the House, including 11 Republicans — and Luna filed the proposal as a discharge petition, which would allow them to circumvent leadership and force a floor vote.
One week ago, Johnson moved to pass a separate rule package that would have killed Luna’s effort, but she and her allies blocked it from passing. In turn, Johnson sent House lawmakers home for the rest of the week without taking up any of the GOP-led bills they had planned to vote on.
Luna praised Trump after reaching her deal with Johnson over the weekend.
“Thanks to POTUS and his support of new moms being able to vote when recovering from child brith as well as those who worked hard to get these changes done,” Luna wrote on X. “If we truly want a pro-family Congress, these are the changes that need to happen.”
Pettersen and other Democrats said the GOP compromise fell far short of the proxy voting proposal, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., calling the Republican opposition “a very strange hill for them to die on.” It’s unclear if any Democrats will even participate in the vote-pairing exercise in the future.
Just before Tuesday’s vote, Pettersen and Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., gave notice to advance the bill they worked on with Luna anyway. It won’t go anywhere with Luna and other Republicans now not on board.
“Speaker Johnson made it impossible for Republicans,” Pettersen told NBC News in an interview off the House floor on Tuesday.
Pettersen said she learned through the process that “politics can be incredibly frustrating and misleading,” and defended Luna when pressed by reporters.
“She was being blamed for the floor stopping. But actually, Speaker Johnson decided to do that to make sure that we didn’t have a vote on this,” Pettersen said. “It was not Representative Luna, and she was getting a ton of heat.”
Holding her 9-week-old son, Sam, Pettersen shared that deciding to fly back to Washington four weeks after giving birth in February to vote against a Republican budget resolution was a “difficult decision.”
“I was worried about Sam’s health … not knowing how many days I would be stuck here not having any support — but knowing if I didn’t show up I would never forgive myself,” she said. “So you shouldn’t be forced to be in that position. You’re being prevented from doing your job because you’re a woman and because you have a baby.”
Asked if vote pairing would suffice, Pettersen replied: “What Republican would be willing to vote present for me this week? Nobody. That’s why it doesn’t work.”
“The bottom line is we need more women,” added Pettersen, who is only the 14th member of Congress to give birth while serving. “We need more moms in Congress to actually change the way we do things here.”
Jacobs, who joined Pettersen on the floor, said it was “disheartening” to see Republican leadership block the proxy voting proposal.
“It’s really disheartening, obviously. Like I always knew that like them calling themselves the … party of family values was hypocritical, but just to see the length they would go to prevent young families from being adequately represented in Congress, it’s really disheartening,” she said.
