April 03, 2025 02:18 PM UTC

Luna, Pettersen Team Up To Shut The Boys Down

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Brittany Pettersen pick up a big unexpected endorsement in their quest for proxy voting for new parents, reports Axios:

President Trump threw his weight behind Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) in her fight with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) over proxy voting that has paralyzed the House floor.

Why it matters: His comments will likely further embolden Luna and make it even more difficult for Johnson to defang her efforts to force a vote on the issue.

What he’s saying: “I don’t know why it’s controversial,” Trump said Thursday of Luna’s proposal to let House members vote by proxy for three months after the birth of their child.

Neither do we. And Speaker Mike Johnson won’t miss his legs below the knees.

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A remarkable update to a story we’ve been following off and on for weeks in Washington, D.C. as two ideologically opposite moms in Congress, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Brittany Pettersen from Colorado, have taken on and for the time being defeated House Republican leadership trying to forestall what would be majority support for letting new parents vote by proxy during their maternal or paternal leave periods. As ABC News reports:

The House voted on Tuesday to stop Republican leaders from blocking an impending vote on proxy voting for new parents.

The vote failed 206-222, with nine Republicans siding with a unanimous Democratic caucus to form an unusual bipartisan coalition — throwing the House in a temporary paralysis with the surprise development.

The joint rule they voted on would have blocked Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s bipartisan discharge petition to allow proxy voting for new lawmaker parents up to 12 weeks after giving birth.

The failure of this vote resulted in the cancellation of all votes scheduled for this week, and Politico reports that Speaker Mike Johnson had no choice but to send lawmakers home:

Luna called it a “pretty historical day” in comments to reporters. “It’s showing that the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington, and also to the importance of female members having a vote,” she said.

The failure of Tuesday afternoon’s vote also effectively killed the House GOP’s legislative plans for the week. The rule would have teed up the rest of the legislative agenda, including a closely watched measure to rein in federal judges who have opposed President Donald Trump, but GOP leaders instead opted to send members home for the week.

Speaker Mike Johnson called the outcome “very disappointing.”

In short, what we have is House leadership dug in against a majority of the House, doing everything within their power to kill a discharge petition with majority support. The whole point of the discharge petition process is to allow measures with majority support to come to the floor even if leadership doesn’t like them. But perhaps even worse that leadership defying a majority of their own are the excuses that Johnson made for refusing to budge on proxy voting, even for such a sympathetic situation as a newborn baby:

“I believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it violates more than two centuries of tradition in the institution, and I think that it opens a Pandora’s box where, ultimately, maybe no one is here, and we’re all voting remotely by AI or something. I don’t know. [Pols emphasis] I don’t think that’s what Congress is supposed to be,” Johnson said at a news conference last week.

Folks, that’s simply not what this proposal would do, applying only to the limited circumstance of parental leave following childbirth. Proxy voting became common practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Republicans shut the practice down after retaking control of the House. This proposal is not a return to full proxy voting on demand, just a limited concession for new parents.

After the vote Rep. Luna and Pettersen fired back jubilantly:

Once more for the search engines:

“Don’t fuck with moms.” -Rep. Brittany Pettersen

With the week’s business in the House abandoned, House Republican leadership is vowing to put the same rules bill up next week, and “dare them to block Trump agenda again.” The President himself hasn’t weighed in publicly on this impasse as of yet, quite possibly because he is aware of the very bad “optics” of…well, fucking with moms. If at least a few Republicans including Rep. Luna hold the line against what’s been reported to be enormous pressure from leadership to give up this fight, they could well bring business in the House to a halt once again. This isn’t obstruction, it’s a safety valve to ensure a majority in the House can still be heard despite its current leadership.

On behalf of new moms and dads everywhere, this is a morally unassailable stand.