Luna, Johnson Strike a Truce on Proxy Voting That Gets the House Back to Business

After a few unexpected days off, the House is back in D.C. to resolve a family feud that’s grabbed headlines from coast to coast. For Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the spat was an unfortunate return to normal after weeks of surprising unity. And while it was inevitable that the harmonious spell Donald Trump cast over Republicans would break at some point, most people just didn’t expect it to be over something as universally despised as proxy voting.

To the casual observer, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-Fla.) request to vote from home after childbirth seemed reasonable. After all, employers make plenty of accommodations for new parents in the normal world. But serving in Congress isn’t a normal job — and changing that, conservatives say, would mean opening a Pandora’s box that couldn’t easily be shut.

Luna vehemently disagreed, and she put the entire House agenda on hold last week to prove it. Using a tool called a discharge petition, she tried to force Johnson’s hand on a piece of legislation that would let new parents vote remotely for the first 12 weeks of a baby’s birth or after an adoption. With the help of Democrats and eight other Republicans, the Florida mom ultimately ground the chamber’s business to a halt, prompting the speaker to take the unusual step of canceling the week’s business and sending members home while he worked on a solution.

Congressmen like Nathanial Moran (R-Texas) were frustrated by the power move, pointing out on “Washington Watch,” “In the history of the United States, we have not allowed proxy voting up until Nancy Pelosi did it during the pandemic a few years ago,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. “We didn’t allow proxy voting after 9/11, not during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, not during the Civil War or the War of 1812. You can go through the list. We never allowed it. Why? Because the Constitution is firm [on] getting together physically and being present physically with one another to deliberate and decide the important matters of the American people. So, proxy voting is not a … constitutionally permitted avenue to go. And it certainly is not a conservative viewpoint.”

Worse, Moran continued, the House just wasted valuable time working on the president’s priorities to have this intra-party spat. “Frankly, we have shot ourselves in the foot here in the House of Representatives and done ourselves a disservice,” he shook his head, “and done the people of America a disservice.”

In the days that followed, Johnson worked frantically behind the scenes to come up with a compromise, all the while hoping cooler heads would prevail. That effort was complicated by the president, who seemed to come out in support of Luna, questioning why this was even a debate. “It’s a little controversial, I don’t know why it’s controversial,” Trump told reporters Thursday, adding, “I’m going to let the speaker make the decision, but I like the idea of being able to, if you’re having a baby I think you should be able to call in and vote,” he continued. “I’m in favor of that, but I understand some people aren’t.”

But no sooner had Trump given his blessing than the drama took another twist. On Friday, the speaker relayed portions of his private conversation with the president, where Trump seems to have been persuaded about the inherent dangers of such a change. “‘Mike, you have my proxy on proxy voting,’” the speaker relayed from their talk. “America is grateful to have a President who appreciates and understands the complexity of legislative branch issues and governing with a razor-thin House majority. Democrats tried proxy voting before and it was terribly abused. We cannot open that Pandora’s box again.”

As members like Moran had insisted, “We cannot allow our sympathetic propositions to supplant constitutional principles. And that’s what’s going on here.” He wasn’t alone in his frustration. In perhaps one of the most telling statistics, not a single Republican congresswoman joined Luna in the vote to force this on the chamber. In fact, they were outspokenly opposed. “We cannot allow this to happen,” Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) implored before thanking Johnson for “standing firm against proxy voting.” “You have my full support,” she wanted people to know.

Others, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) were even harsher in their criticism. “Serving in Congress is a privilege, not a career choice,” Greene pointed out. “If you need a job with better perks like maternity leave, then step down and allow someone else to serve in your place. … You are being used by the Democrats to bring back proxy voting when you are clearly, in your own words, against people receiving taxpayer funded paychecks working from home.” It was a sharp but accurate takedown of the nine Republicans’ hypocrisy on other remote work.

But as conservatives bickered, valuable time was slipping away, Moran warned. “[N]ow we have a number of really important bills that we cannot vote on this week that were planned. … All over this desire to allow proxy voting,” he told Perkins. “[W]e effectively let emotion trump logic in this debate. And when that happens, we simply become liberal policymakers. That’s how liberals make decisions. Conservatives should make decisions based on logic, principles, and the Constitution, not emotion.”

By the weekend, days after the issue triggered a House shutdown, the ice between the two sides seemed to be thawing. Luna and Johnson talked about narrowing the idea to just mothers before ultimately striking a tentative deal that calls for “vote pairing.” Essentially, experts explain, this would allow a House member who isn’t physically present (like a new mom) to find someone on the opposite side of the issue who would agree to abstain from the vote — effectively offsetting the missing member’s vote.

“Speaker Johnson and I have reached an agreement and are formalizing a procedure called ‘live/dead pairing’ — dating back to the 1800s — for the entire conference to use when unable to physically be present to vote: new parents, bereaved, emergencies,” she wrote. She thanked the president for his guidance “as well as all of those who worked to get this change done, this is becoming the most modern, pro-family Congress we’ve ever seen.”

The speaker confirmed the deal on a conference call with Republican members Sunday afternoon, urging them to get to work in passing the Senate’s budget resolution before these distractions threatened Trump’s entire agenda. “Proxy voting aside,” Johnson had said, “I am actively working on every possible accommodation to make Congressional service simpler for young mothers. As the pro-family party, our aim as Republicans is to support those principles while also defending our constitutional traditions.”

Leaders have a lot of ideas toward that end, he explained. “We need a room for nursing mothers if they need that, that’ll be right off the House floor. We have a family room but there may be ways to improve access and make it even easier. We’re looking at the travel policies, potentially the use of [member representative allowance] to allow travel for mothers with young children to be able to transport them back and forth so they get more time with them. … We want to accommodate mothers who want to serve in Congress … [b]ut we can’t do something that violates the Constitution or destroys the institution we serve in.”

Perkins agreed, recognizing that the dilemma for new parents “tugged at people’s heartstrings.” “Look, we’re the Family Research Council,” he said. “We know how important it is for that bonding of parent and child. But we also know if you signed up to run for Congress, and you were elected to Congress, you have a constitutional obligation to represent the people that you were elected to represent — and to do so in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution. So how do you draw the line at new parents?”

Johnson made that point in their conference, Moran explained. “He said, ‘Where does it stop? Somebody next [is] going to say, ‘Well, I have an illness that’s going to prevent me from being there,’ or ‘I’ve had a car accident,’ or ‘I have something important to do at home under those circumstances.’ … And there is a slippery slope once it begins. There is no end to that.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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