The Battle Over Discharge Petitions and Proxy Voting for New Parents Heats Up

Leadership is still pushing against a resolution that would give new parents the ability to vote remotely. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna — the Freedom Caucus Republican who is the main author of the legislation — says she isn’t backing down.

“This is about changing the institution for the better,” Luna told NOTUS Thursday. “We had some great members of Congress that we lost because of the fact that they were like, ‘this was just too hard with her family.’ You have another member who just announced that she’s pregnant, which we’re so happy for her, but I hope she never has to deal with not being able to vote and represent her constituents because she’s out.”

House Republican leaders have pushed back on the idea of proxy voting since it was first implemented during the coronavirus pandemic by then-Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When Republicans took back control of the House at the start of 2023, they almost immediately ended proxy voting.

But Luna — along with Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and Democratic Reps. Brittany Pettersen and Sara Jacobs — is trying to adopt a rule that would allow new parents to vote by proxy for up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child.

GOP leaders, with the prodding of the Freedom Caucus, are desperate to reject the proposal, even if there may be a healthy majority within the House that supports it.

With that tricky issue of overruling the majority in mind, Republicans are trying to find a way to prevent a discharge petition from forcing a vote. Under House rules, 218 members can sign a discharge petition and force a floor vote on legislation. But in their efforts to prevent the proxy voting rule from coming up, many Freedom Caucus members want to raise the threshold for a discharge petition.

One senior GOP member said there are plenty of “options we’re exploring” to turn off Luna’s petition, but at the moment, they’re trying to gauge “what the conference has a tolerance for.”

“I’ve never proxy voted, and I don’t think it’s constitutional, but I also think this is one of those unique jobs where you have to be looking a colleague in the eye and view him on the floor to get to be able to do this job effectively,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday. “You cannot do this job remotely.”

GOP leaders haven’t been shy about building opposition against the discharge petition, and they say they’ve seen some movement in their direction.

Rep. Rich McCormick, one of 12 Republicans to sign on to the petition, explained to reporters that he changed his mind after considering the constitutional ramifications.

“When you learn more, you make better decisions,” McCormick said. “And there’s a lot of people out there that I probably should have talked to before I took the jump.”

A senior GOP aide told NOTUS the tentative plan is to try and “turn off” Luna’s petition in a rule next week.

However, one GOP member who doesn’t support the discharge petition but was granted anonymity to speak about the situation said there was nothing leadership could do to avoid Luna’s petition from getting a vote — and likely getting adopted. The resolution looks like it will get a vote as early as next week.

“This is an unfortunate move by her, but I’m a little skeptical that leadership can turn anything off,” this member said.

Luna met with Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Chip Roy on Wednesday to discuss her petition. Roy and Johnson tried to persuade her to pull it and not move forward with it. But, she told NOTUS, the conversation changed nothing. She’s moving ahead.

GOP Whip Tom Emmer, who was not in the meetings, told NOTUS that he didn’t think there was “any real progress” on convincing Luna to pull the resolution, but he said it was a positive sign that she and leadership were talking.

In the meantime, Luna has tried to hold leadership’s feet to the fire in the press. As she addressed a horde of reporters about the status of her petition Thursday morning, she waved another Republican ally, Rep. Tim Burchett, into the conversation.

“Tell them about what happened with your legislation and what they just offered you,” Luna said to Burchett.

Burchett said that someone — he declined to specify who — asked him whether putting two of his bills concerning “defunding the Taliban” and “selling genetic material” on the floor would incentivize him to vote against the petition.

“Somebody said, ‘Well, if we got those bills on the floor, would you vote against Luna?’” Burchett told reporters. “I was like, ‘Voting against pregnant women? Are y’all crazy?’”

Democrats seem to be having a field day with the issue, sensing a political opportunity to divide Republicans on an issue like voting against new parents.

Adding fuel to the political fire, Democrats also sent a letter to Johnson Wednesday requesting answers into a reported incident of Rep. Byron Donalds handing off his member card so that he could vote while commuting to California to appear on Bill Maher’s show.

The top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, Jim McGovern — who led the letter — said Johnson needed to answer for that incident if he’s so against proxy voting.

“He turns a blind eye when Donalds does it? That’s hypocritical,” McGovern said of Johnson.

There have been some whispers of concern among Democrats about the specific language of the discharge petition. The resolution doesn’t allow proxy voting for parents who had children via surrogate, a particular concern for gay couples, but it’s unclear if Democrats would actually oppose the current proposal over that issue.

House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told NOTUS Democrats are fully behind the petition and that the caucus is “uniform that progress is progress, and that this is a step forward for parents who are giving birth.”

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Daniella Diaz, Reese Gorman and Riley Rogerson are reporters at NOTUS.