WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday tried and failed to kill a bipartisan effort to change House rules so that lawmakers would temporarily be allowed to vote remotely after the birth of a child, suffering an embarrassing defeat that paralyzed the chamber and signaled that the proposal could soon be adopted.
Using strong-arm tactics in a bid to block the measure, Johnson tried an extraordinary use of the speaker’s power to prevent the House from even considering a measure backed by half its members. But nine Republicans refused to go along, instead dealing him a public rebuke that left him without a strategy for moving ahead.
After the vote, Johnson abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week, sending members home and leaving legislative business unsettled. Under House rules, Republican leaders are required to bring the proxy voting resolution to a vote within two legislative days. But they appeared to be refusing to do anything else until the holdouts in their party cave, which they have shown no sign of doing. As Republicans left Washington for the week having passed no bills, it was not clear how or when the issue would be resolved.
The showdown on the House floor was a capstone of a long-running fight over the rights of new parents in Congress.
It began over a year ago, when Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., began agitating for a change to House rules that would allow new mothers to designate a colleague to vote by proxy on their behalf for up to six weeks after giving birth. Luna landed on the idea after her own child was born.
There is no maternity or paternity leave for lawmakers, who can take time away from office without sacrificing their pay but cannot vote if they are not physically in the Capitol. Proponents of the change have called it a common-sense fix to modernize Congress, where more women and more younger members serve now than did 200 years ago.
Democrats, including Reps. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, who gave birth this year to her second child, and Sara Jacobs of California, joined Luna’s effort, expanding the resolution to include new fathers and up to 12 weeks of proxy voting during a parental leave.
Johnson has adamantly opposed the group at every turn, arguing that proxy voting is unacceptable and unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court refused to take up a Republican-led lawsuit challenging pandemic-era proxy voting rules in the House.
On Tuesday, he used an unprecedented parliamentary maneuver to close off the only path that members of the House have for steering around their leaders and forcing a vote on a measure that has majority support.
But that measure failed on the floor by a 222-206 vote, keeping alive the proxy voting proposal. Eight Republicans joined Luna and all Democrats in voting no.
Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allows members to vote without being at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and that it harms member collegiality.
“I do believe it’s an existential issue for this body,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the Rules Committee, said Tuesday. “Congress is defined as the ‘act of coming together and meeting.’”
Later on the floor, Foxx asserted flatly: “Put simply, members of Congress need to show up for work.”
When Johnson refused to bring the bill to the floor, Luna and her cohorts used a tool called the discharge petition — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of the measure.
But on Tuesday morning, Republicans on the Rules Committee, often referred to as the “speaker’s committee” because the speaker uses it to maintain control of the floor, engineered a tricky behind-the-scenes maneuver to kill the effort.
They approved 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.
GOP lawmakers inserted it into an unrelated resolution to allow for a vote on the SAVE Act, legislation requiring people to prove their citizenship when they register to vote, in a bid to pressure Republicans to support it. That is the measure that failed Tuesday on the floor.
Democrats implored Republicans to consider the proxy voting change, which they argued was vital to allowing all lawmakers to do their jobs.
“It is unfathomable that in 2025 we have not modernized Congress to address these very unique challenges that members face — these life events, where our voices should still be heard, our constituents should still be represented,” Pettersen said on the House floor, holding her 9-week-old son, Sam, who gurgled in her arms.
She denounced Johnson’s maneuver, saying: “It is anti-woman. It is anti-family.”
They also called the move an unprecedented attempt to shut down a crucial mechanism in the House for ensuring that measures that have majority support are voted upon.
“Republicans love to talk about family values, but when given the chance to actually support families, they turn their backs,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “If you want to protect your rights as members of Congress, you should vote no here.”
In trying to block the measure, Johnson took a gamble, risking public humiliation in a bid to thwart a resolution that had support from members of both parties.
Johnson even leaned on President Donald Trump to help him, people familiar with the conversations said, hoping the president could urge Luna, a stalwart Trump supporter, to stand down. The pressure campaign, however, appeared to have only strengthened Luna’s resolve.
On Monday, Luna resigned from the House Freedom Caucus, citing its members’ unwillingness to back her in what she called a “modest, family-centered proposal.”
After the vote Tuesday, she told reporters the proposal would improve the House and the country.
“We had a good majority of Republicans as well that agreed this needs to change and it’s part of a healthy republic,” she said. She added that it was a big day for the institution “and allowing new parents to have a voice in Washington.”
Johnson’s view is in line with the longtime Republican position on proxy voting.
Republicans savaged Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for breaking with centuries of history and House rules by instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic. When he was minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., filed an unsuccessful lawsuit arguing that allowing a member of Congress to deputize a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf when they were not present was unconstitutional.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.