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WASHINGTON — A bipartisan push to allow new and soon-to-be parents in Congress to cast votes from outside Washington cleared a significant and rare hurdle, giving backers the power to force a vote on the measure in the House despite the disapproval of the Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
A discharge petition – an uncommon method for forcing legislation to the House floor that bypasses leadership – filed by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., officially garnered 218 signatures from fellow House members, her office announced on Tuesday evening, reaching the threshold needed to send the measure to the floor without the speaker.
The maneuver’s success is rare in history. Before 2022, data kept by Brookings Institution found only 4% of the hundreds of discharge petitions filed since 1935 succeeded, though lawmakers were successful in forcing a vote via the method just last year on the Social Security Fairness Act.
A dozen House Republicans, including Luna, bucked Johnson to sign onto the petition while the rest of the signatures came from Democrats.
“The Republican party family is pro-family, I’m simply reminding them of that,” Luna told Spectrum News on Tuesday.
The bill, introduced by Luna, Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., and Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., would give lawmakers who are new or expecting parents a 12-week window in which they do not need to be present at the Capitol to vote but instead are allowed to cast them remotely, also known as proxy voting.
Petterson, who gave birth in January and took her newborn son to Washington to cast votes, introduced the legislation at the beginning of the new congress this year. Luna, who gave birth while in office in 2023, filed the petition amid inaction on the bill from the speaker, who told CNN in January that while he has “empathy” for female lawmakers of birthing age, the move “doesn’t fit with the language of the Constitution.”
Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas reiterated Johnson’s view in the wake of the petition reaching the required signatures.
“I think at some point you’ve just got to do your job, otherwise, step aside and let somebody else do the job,” Roy told reporters on Wednesday, adding that it is clear that proxy voting is “unconstitutional.”
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who supported the petition, pushed back on the argument that the move clashes with the Constitution, pointing to the fact that it was allowed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We did it during the pandemic, and we were able to defend it. So it’s not against the Constitution,” he said.
“I think that the time has come for Congress to adapt to the modern era,” Gomez continued. “We’re no longer, you know, just 80-year-old members that no longer have kids in diapers. We’re new dads, new mothers, people that want to have families but also fight for our district."
Luna on Tuesday told Spectrum News she removed a quorum clause from the measure specifically to address GOP concerns about its constitutionality.
Former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California implemented proxy voting in May 2020 amid the pandemic, a move that was then ended by former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy in January 2023.
