House Speaker Mike Johnson ended his weeklong stalemate with congressional Republicans, whose insistence that members of Congress on maternity leave should be able to vote from home sparked an internal civil war – and led him to cancel all floor votes for the remainder of the week.
But the start of the new week brought a fresh agreement that effectively ended the bipartisan push to change House rules to allow proxy voting for new parents, The New York Times reported Monday. The “watered-down solution” came after Johnson talked Donald Trump into supporting his position after the president publicly broke with the House speaker last week, the Times said.
“Mr. Johnson has committed to allowing a convoluted arrangement to give a narrow group of lawmakers — women who face medical complications after childbirth that prevent them from being present in Washington — a way of registering their position on some legislation in their absence without actually being able to vote,” according to the Monday report.
It’s a maneuver known as “vote pairing” that doesn’t require a change to House rules, “and is a far cry from allowing new parents in Congress to fully participate in legislating,” the Times added. But the move will allow Johnson to end the fractious GOP rule fight that threatened Trump’s MAGA agenda in the House.
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The arrangement has been used in the Senate “for more than a century,” the report said.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who bucked her own party’s leadership in her attempt to force a rule change to allow proxy voting, spun the arrangement Monday as a victory.
“This is becoming the most modern, pro-family Congress we’ve ever seen,” Luna wrote in a social media post.
But not all saw it that way.
“Our shared goal has been to support new parents so they can do their jobs and vote on behalf of their constituents while also taking care of themselves and their families,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) told the Times. “This ‘deal’ falls short of that goal — silencing new parents and perpetuating the status quo and the notion that Congress is ineffective and obsolete.”