March 27, 2025 03:10 PM UTC

Why Do House Republican Leaders Hate Babies?

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• by: Colorado Pols

FRIDAY UPDATE: GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is turning up the heat on Speaker Mike Johnson over alleged bribes and threats to persuade her to abandon her discharge petition on proxy voting. NPR reports:

Florida Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna is accusing leaders from her own party of threatening and bribing other lawmakers to block her effort to allow proxy voting for new parents in the House of Representatives.

“I’m not going to be bought. I will tell you that I’ve now been reached out to multiple times, offering me positions on different committees, and I don’t want it because this is bigger than me,” Luna told reporters on Thursday. “It’s about actually changing the institution for the better.”

…Luna says GOP leaders and their allies are using a mix of threats and horse trading to try to get lawmakers to derail that vote. She says she was even offered a committee slot on a panel that she was initially rejected from earlier this year. Luna didn’t specify that the speaker was personally making any offers or threats, but said “multiple people” have reached out to her.

All we can say is it’s a bizarre hill for the “party of family values” to die on.

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As Politico reports today, the title of this post is not actually the frothing partisan hyperbole it might be dismissed as at first glance, as a bipartisan effort we wrote about earlier this month to carve out some post-partum dispensation for new congressional parents in the form of proxy voting during maternity leave is causing “big headaches” for Republican leaders who stamped out proxy voting after taking back the House from COVID-era Democratic control and don’t want anybody to ever have it back:

House GOP leaders are racing to head off a vote being pushed by one of their own members on a measure that would allow lawmakers who are new parents to vote by proxy.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) has already gathered enough member signatures on a discharge petition to force a vote. But Speaker Mike Johnson, who argues that proxy voting is unconstitutional, is considering several options to prevent it from happening as Luna mulls the way forward…

Luna said leaders are also threatening members who are backing her, telling them their bills will not come to the floor and that the party won’t be “helping with fundraising.” She said she was also offered committee assignments she had previously been denied as an enticement to end her proxy-voting push.

As local readers know, this conflict came to a head at the end of February when Colorado’s Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a brand new mom and fully disclosed friend of the blog, rushed to Washington with her newborn son to cast her vote against the Republican budget resolution. Another Republican who signed Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s discharge petition to force a vote on proxy voting for new parents summed up the optics problem Republican leadership faces in trying to squish this effort:

One Republican who joined Luna in the discharge effort, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, said “somebody” offered to bring a bill he sponsored to the floor in exchange for switching his vote.

“Voting against pregnant women, are y’all crazy?” Burchett said he responded. [Pols emphasis]

Not only is Republican leadership trying to make life harder on pregnant women, they’re also literally messing with babies by forcing members to bring their newborn children to Washington in order to carry out their duties. There’s no practical reason why representatives can’t vote by proxy for a limited period right after they or their spouse–or even their mistress, you know who you are–give birth to a bouncing beautiful baby. Republicans are supposed to be the “party of family values,” and it’s hard to imagine a better way to express that than letting new parent members of Congress have a little consideration to allow them to continue doing their jobs.

If Republicans want to affirm the stereotype that they only care about babies until they’re born, they’re on the right track.