Why House GOP Leadership Pulled Out All the Stops to Kill This Vote–and It Backfired

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At the beginning of the year, a bipartisan group of younger members of Congress introduced a resolution that would allow members who are new parents to vote by proxy for 12 weeks.

Several months later, an aggressive attempt from House Republican leadership to prevent this from getting a vote backfired, prompting an irritated Speaker Mike Johnson to send House members home for the week—on a Tuesday afternoon!—to think about what they’d done. It followed weeks of leaders threatening, cajoling, and otherwise applying maximum pressure and procedural tactics to stop this train from leaving the station. It’s as hard as they’ve fought against anything.

Why? Would letting members with a newborn vote by proxy for 12 weeks in fact be the end of the world?

The central bipartisan pair behind the measure are Colorado Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen and Florida GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. Both have had children while in Congress, and both have found it to be unnecessarily burdensome to fly back and forth to Washington while taking care of newborns, just to put a voting card in a machine and press a button. So they put together the resolution. It attracted more Democrats by allowing new fathers to vote by proxy in addition to mothers, and it attempted to soften the gripes of Republicans, who’ve challenged the constitutionality of proxy voting, by noting that proxies wouldn’t be counted toward establishing a quorum.

But most Republicans still opposed it—and some loathed it. Speaker Johnson, and some of the louder voices in the Freedom Caucus, argue that it would mark the beginning of a slippery slope, and that by reopening this door after Republicans shut down proxy voting altogether in 2023, more and more exceptions would be made down the road. The days of vote-by-boat would be here again.

With the bill going nowhere, Luna—a MAGA conservative and Freedom Caucus member since she first won her seat in 2022—began collecting signatures for a discharge petition. This process, which rarely works, allows members to circumvent leaders and force a vote on legislation if they can collect 218 signatures. The maneuver is highly frowned upon by the leadership, as it essentially takes away their control of the floor. Much of the reasoning behind Republicans’ aggressive response, then, has been trying to set an example: Members need to know that they can’t take the reins away from House leadership without consequences.

Luna’s petition reached 218 signatures in mid-March, with a dozen Republicans signing. According to Luna, the arm-twisting from leaders, offering a mix of carrots and sticks, was intense. She claimed to have been offered a committee slot for which she was rejected earlier in the year. Vulnerable members signing the petition, she said, were told they could have their fundraising cut off. One signer, conservative Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, said he was told he’d get votes on bills of his if he voted against Luna. It didn’t work.

But it wasn’t just leadership pushing this. Several of Luna’s fellow members of the Freedom Caucus held up a vote last week and, in plain sight on the floor, buttonholed their leaders about what they would do to kill Luna’s discharge petition. They discussed potentially raising the signature threshold for a discharge petition from 218, or setting up a vote to rule this specific discharge petition—or any other to force a vote on a similar bill—out of order.

Leaders chose the latter strategy. And they used another hardball maneuver to try to separate Luna from her GOP allies: The same resolution that would kill Luna’s petition would also set up votes on a couple of popular GOP priorities, including a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, and another to prevent district courts from issuing nationwide injunctions.

“The intent” of this strategy, as Luna wrote in a Monday letter to her Freedom Caucus colleagues, “was clear: to misrepresent me and the members supporting this pro-life, pro-family initiative … as obstructing the President and opposing election integrity.” Luna blamed members of the Freedom Caucus for concocting this plan, in a “betrayal of trust.” Her letter was to announce her resignation from the group.

This tactic, though, didn’t work. The rule vote failed Tuesday afternoon, as nine Republicans joined Democrats to kill it—to loud cheers from the Democratic side when the vote was gaveled in. Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week and, as was the strategy, pinned it on Luna and her fellow defectors.

“Let me just make this clear,” Johnson told reporters afterward. “That rule being brought down means we cannot have any further action on the floor this week. That means we will not be voting on the SAVE Act for election integrity. We will not be voting on the rogue judges that are attacking President Trump’s agenda.”

“All that was just wiped off the table,” he said. “It is very unfortunate.”

There’s no indication that Johnson or Freedom Caucus members are going to give up yet. They may try another maneuver when Congress returns next week—and they’ll hope that the GOP rebels, having gotten an earful from constituents, can be ground down.

Another option, though, would be to let the House vote to allow members with newborns to vote by proxy for 12 weeks, and get this over with. Even rank-and-file GOP members who voted against Luna are questioning why the speaker is spending such an exorbitant amount of political capital trying, and failing, to kill it. It’s not a great look for the party. And going by Luna’s resolve so far? She doesn’t look like someone about to cave.