House Republican leaders are playing hardball as they try to stop Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) from triggering a vote on a bill to allow proxy voting for new parents, throwing a procedural hurdle at the push that will test the will of those who support Luna’s full-on legislative war against Republican leadership.
Using arcane parliamentary warfare, GOP leaders are preparing a vote for Tuesday that issues a dare to the Republican lawmakers: If you vote to support Luna and allow her proposal to come to the floor, you will halt action on other legislation that President Trump supports, including on limiting the power of federal judges and requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
The House Rules Committee on Tuesday morning advanced a procedural rule to set up that vote.
The fight pits arguments about constitutionality and a slippery slope against a desire among “pro-life” Republicans to show support for new moms and families, all while having major ramifications for how much control leaders can maintain over the House floor going forward in their razor-thin majority.
And it is fracturing coalitions in the House GOP.
Luna — who has long pushed for proxy voting for new moms and had her first child months into her first term — resigned from the House Freedom Caucus on Monday after members of the group pushed the Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to be more aggressive in trying to kill her measure. She said in a resignation letter that “respect” among lawmakers in the group had been “shattered last week” and alleged that they threatened to halt floor action if the Speaker did not agree to their hardball tactics.
Luna earlier this month had gotten more than 200 House Democrats and about a dozen Republicans to sign a discharge petition to allow her to force floor action on the proxy voting resolution. The legislation itself is being led by Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.), who had a child in January, and would allow members who give birth or lawmakers whose spouses give birth to designate another member to vote on their behalf for 12 weeks.
Discharge petitions are rarely successful, and amount to a major defiance of leadership. Johnson, arguing against the move to members last week, called it a “tool of the minority.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) noted that Luna had to “team up with mostly Democrats, 90 percent Democrats, who are in the minority.”
“We’re in the majority on the Republican side, and want to be able to move the Republican agenda. And you know, I’d rather not move Pelosi policies over the majority,” Scalise said.
While proxy voting was widely used by both parties when it was implemented under Democratic leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, it drew widespread Republican criticism and unsuccessful legal challenges — concerns that Luna has brushed aside, saying the resolution prevents concerns about members voting by proxy counting toward a quorum.
GOP leaders at first tried to get the Republicans who signed the petition to change their minds — and did get Reps. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) and Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) to back off their support. But with nearly all Democrats expected to support the measure, there was great risk of the resolution succeeding if it came to the floor, since that would take just a couple of Republican defections in the razor-thin majority.
Leadership then took the more aggressive tactic, aiming to stop the push before the discharge petition could “ripen” and had the opportunity to ...
