House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Freedom Caucus members are aligned on one objective this week: killing a discharge petition that would allow new parents to vote by proxy in the House.
A healthy majority of Freedom Caucus members made their opposition to the discharge petition known on Tuesday when they withheld their support on a procedural vote, threatening to turn control of the House floor over to Democrats.
Freedom Caucus members ultimately voted for the procedural motion — a rule establishing debate for a package of energy bills — but only after a contentious discussion on the House floor with Majority Whip Tom Emmer, where they demanded that leadership find a way to table the discharge petition, according to a source familiar with the talks.
After the standoff, Rep. Chip Roy refused to talk about the specifics of the discussion, but he said Freedom Caucus members and Emmer were having “a spirited conversation about how things get to the floor, what gets to the floor and when it gets there.”
“The House is a majoritarian body, that’s what it is, and that’s fine, but we’re also a body that has parties, and you have to be able to manage and control the floor,” Roy said. “We’re also supposed to be guardians of the Constitution, and the Constitution does not remotely contemplate remote voting and not being present. You’re supposed to be present in the chamber.”
How exactly leadership plans to kill the discharge petition remains to be seen. But sources suggested there is no shortage of options.
“There are a lot of procedural tools available,” one senior GOP aide told NOTUS.
A person familiar with the debate also told NOTUS that Freedom Caucus members have asked leadership to raise the threshold of support for discharge petitions to two-thirds of the House instead of the 218 majority in the full House. That would make it more difficult for a small group of Republicans to join with Democrats to get a vote on a legislative proposal, but it would also have far-reaching implications beyond this proxy voting for new parents proposal.
Twelve Republicans have already signed on to a discharge petition to allow new parents to vote by proxy for up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child.
That proposal — led by Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Democrat Brittany Pettersen, Democrat Sara Jacobs and Republican Mike Lawler — has solid bipartisan support, after the group got almost all Democrats and a dozen Republicans to sign on to the discharge petition to force a vote on the resolution.
(A discharge petition requires 218 signatures in the House to force a vote on a proposal.)
House GOP leaders are in the process of whipping those 12 Republicans to vote against the resolution once it hits the floor, one House Republican told NOTUS. But that whip effort might fail, with some Republicans — like Luna, who is a member of the Freedom Caucus — appearing dedicated to the proxy voting proposal.
Democrats also appear nearly unified in support of the proposal. And with such a narrow GOP majority, it would likely only take a few Republicans to support the resolution for it to be adopted.
House Republican leaders are also concerned, according to a person familiar with the whip effort, that there is more GOP support for the proxy voting resolution than just the 12 Republicans who have already signed on.
And the Freedom Caucus efforts to overrule a clear majority in the House could inspire other Republicans to join the effort.
“If they want to play hardball, let’s play fucking hardball,” Luna said Tuesday after her Freedom Caucus colleagues tried to squash the discharge petition.
Johnson himself started the day by speaking out against Luna’s proposal in a closed-door meeting with Republicans, arguing it’s only a tool for the minority party and discouraging members from getting behind it, according to a source in the room.
He told Republicans proxy voting has constitutional issues and mentioned the brief he filed against proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic when Democrats were in the majority.
Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Emmer and House GOP Chair Lisa McClain also said in a joint statement Tuesday that they “sympathize with our colleagues who face circumstances that prevent them from being present, but proxy voting raises serious constitutional questions.”
“It also changes more than two and a half centuries of tradition, abuses the system, and creates the risk of a slippery slope toward more and more members casting votes remotely,” the GOP leaders said.
A spokesperson for Luna told NOTUS that organizers behind the proposal expect the resolution to get a vote on the House floor as early as next week.
“I’m going to do it,” Luna said. “It’ll happen soon.”
She added that she wouldn’t provide a firm timeline, “But I will tell you that we are being very specific on what we are going to time and ensure that everyone that will support it will be here.”
Hours later, Luna posted on X that Johnson was a “kind man and his heart is in the right spot but he’s wrong on proxy voting for new parents.”
“Here are some documents showing him voting by proxy in the 117th Congress, as late as December 2022! He argues it’s ‘unconstitutional’ but has done it several times. Since the case is being made to the public via press, I’m going to do the same,” she said.
Luna had a baby at the end of August 2023, just as the House was returning from a recess. She ended up missing dozens of votes.
Pettersen also more recently had a child, at the end of January, and she has been forced to fly from her home state of Colorado to the Capitol multiple times for votes.
But Republican leaders are staunchly opposed to the idea of bringing back proxy voting, even in this narrow and time-limited form. And the Freedom Caucus, which was partially founded over the inability of certain members to get votes on legislative proposals even when those proposals had majority support, now finds itself at odds with one of its own members, arguing that GOP leaders should change discharge petition rules that have existed for nearly 100 years to subvert the majority.
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Reese Gorman, Oriana González and Daniella Diaz are reporters at NOTUS.