There will be headlines on Tuesday about Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, embarrassing House Speaker Mike Johnson, but it’s worth really digging into the substance of the issue at hand.
Luna has long been a proponent of giving new parents in Congress some flexibility and wanted to change congressional rules to allow them to vote by proxy. Johnson didn’t support her. So she and a bipartisan group of allies — including Brittany Pettersen, Democrat of Colorado — used a procedural maneuver called a discharge petition to allow the entire House of Representatives to vote on the matter. Johnson did everything in his power to stop it and lost on Tuesday.
As my newsroom colleague Annie Karni explained, Johnson went above and beyond to kill the legislation by putting forth “a measure that would block the proxy voting bill or any legislation on a similar topic from reaching the floor during the remainder of the Congress, effectively nullifying the discharge petition and closing off any chance for its supporters to secure a vote on the matter for the next two years.” But Johnson’s effort failed, with a small group of Republicans joining all Democrats in voting no. Afterward, Republicans canceled votes for the rest of the week, and leaders appear to still be considering ways to defeat Luna’s proposal.
The reasons for this intense opposition from Republicans are a little hard to pin down: Though Johnson claims that proxy voting is unconstitutional, there’s a lot of disagreement on that, even from his own party. He and other Republicans have also argued that it’s a slippery slope to too many members skipping in-person votes or voting by A.I. “I get that if you’re expecting and having a child, you want to be here, but that’s your choice,” Representative Ralph Norman told Roll Call. “When you enter Congress, you enter it to serve, and I don’t know where you stop it.”
I don’t think the slippery-slope argument holds water, because the bill’s language narrowly permits proxy voting for just 12 weeks for a “member who has given birth or whose spouse has given birth.”
This also seems like a silly fight to pick at a time when the Republican majority is razor thin. The G.O.P. could use a headline that makes it seem even slightly pro-labor (while firing thousands of people and enforcing a hard return-to-office policy without enough desks or toilet paper) or pro-family (while threatening food stamps and Medicaid). Proxy voting for new parents could have been an easy win that made Republicans look even vaguely human.
Instead, they had the sad spectacle of Representative Wesley Hunt, Republican of Texas — who flew to Washington for votes 16 times while his son, Willie, “was gravely ill in NICU,” according to CNN’s Sarah Ferris — bringing Willie with him to the floor to protest the vote against proxy voting.
I give a lot of credit to Luna, who was willing to go to the mat for this. Since she gave birth to her son in August 2023, she has been fighting for this change, which is the tiniest baby step into the 21st century for Congress. She even left the hard-right Freedom Caucus over its lack of support for the measure.
But it’s hard to imagine that Congress is going to get it together to pass an increased child tax credit — another family-friendly measure that has bipartisan support — when it can’t even pass something tiny like this without a full-scale meltdown.
#Opinion #Mike #Johnson #Inexplicably #Doesnt #Parents #Congress
