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Washington — House Speaker Mike Johnson reached a deal with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna amid her push to allow new parents to vote remotely, which paralyzed the House last week and threatened to delay a key vote on President Trump’s agenda in the coming days. Luna, a Florida Republican, announced Sunday she and Johnson had a deal to use vote pairing — an agreement between an absent member and a member who is physically present and plans to vote on the opposite side of the question, effectively canceling out the vote. The present member casts their vote, then withdraws it and announces that they have paired with the absent member. The vote is not included in the vote total, but their positions are published in the Congressional Record. “It will be open for the entire conference to use when unable to vote (e.g., new parents, bereaved, emergencies, etc.),” Luna wrote Sunday. Johnson said Monday the solution is “no harm, no foul” and “solved her concerns, so that’s a great thing.” On Tuesday, Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, suffered an embarrassing loss to kill the effort to allow new parents to vote remotely around the birth of their child. Johnson, who considers proxy voting to be unconstitutional, said any further floor action was halted and sent members home.
A deal could allow House leaders to move ahead on other legislative priorities this week, including holding a vote on a Republican budget blueprint that passed the Senate over the weekend. Mr. Trump weighed in Thursday on the debate, telling reporters that he supported Luna’s effort to allow new parents to vote remotely. But a day later, Johnson wrote on social media that Mr. Trump told him, “Mike, you have my proxy on proxy voting.”The measure to allow new parents to vote remotely was introduced by Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado in January. The bill would allow new parents to designate a colleague to vote for them for 12 weeks after they or their spouse gives birth. The bill would also allow that period to begin earlier if the lawmaker has a serious medical condition or isn’t able to travel safely. Luna, a cosponsor of the bill, moved to bypass leadership and launched a discharge petition, a procedural move that allows a measure to move forward without the speaker’s approval, to force a vote on it. The discharge petition quickly reached the threshold needed to force a vote, with 206 Democrats and 11 other Republicans signing on.
But Republicans tried to derail Luna’s effort by inserting language into a rule governing debate on an unrelated bill on election security to table her discharge petition. Nine Republicans joined all Democrats during a procedural vote Tuesday to help sink it.Pettersen said in a statement Monday that the agreement between Luna and Johnson “does not address the barriers we’ve fought so hard to overcome.” “Instead of letting us vote, he has instead gone to historic lengths to kill our resolution and make sure the large majority of his Members don’t have a voice,” she said of Johnson. “Let’s be clear: these changes are not a win for us and Speaker Johnson has turned his back on moms and dads in Congress and working families.”House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Republicans’ opposition to allowing new mothers to vote remotely “a strange hill to die on.””What is the Republican problem with allowing expectant mothers to vote on behalf of their constituents?” the New York Democrat said Monday.
Nikole Killion
contributed to this report.
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Caitlin Yilek
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at CBSNews.com, based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
