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Wasserman Schultz got the last laugh, winning her race in a blowout. But the accusation — that a new mother can’t be a good member of Congress — still stings to this day.

That’s why the liberal happily signed on with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), a far-right conservative, for a resolution that would force the House to vote on a rule change to allow parental leave for lawmakers with new children.

Led by Luna and Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colorado) — both of whom are in the rare club of just 14 lawmakers who gave birth while serving in Congress — the proposal would allow new parents up to 12 weeks to stay home and have a lawmaker present in the Capitol vote on their behalf.

It would bring the House close in line with the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Of course, these House members would still work, pay attention to issues and decide how they will vote.

Luna initially wrote her proposal last year only for new mothers, and the first six weeks after birth, but she revised it to apply to new mothers and fathers and extended the period after becoming a parent.

New supporters include Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California), who has openly discussed her desire to be a mother, and Rep. Michael Lawler (R-New York), usually an ally of leadership. Instead, he provided the magic 218th signature to the “discharge petition” that now can force a vote on the issue.

Rather than seeing this as a move toward a modern Congress, Republican leaders have taken up political arms as if the future of democracy is at stake. They view the proxy voting proposal as a relic of the Democratic-led House during the coronavirus pandemic five years ago.

GOP leaders are furious that Luna relied so heavily on Democrats — of her 218 signatures, just a dozen are Republican — but it’s clear there is much more Republican support for her effort.

When Democrats made a proxy voting rules change in the spring of 2020, Republicans declared that the Constitution required a physical presence inside the House chamber to vote.

“I’m pro-family. The Republican Party is pro-family. We want to make it as easy as possible for young parents to be able to participate in the process. But proxy voting, in my view, is unconstitutional,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters on Tuesday, proudly noting his work on a Supreme Court brief that challenged the voting procedure.

What Johnson regularly leaves out is that in early 2022 the high court declined to consider the GOP’s challenge to proxy voting, leaving the practice in place until the new Republican majority ended it in 2023.

Despite the supposed outrage over proxy voting, Republicans themselves took up the practice in early 2021 when the House margins got so close they wanted to make the Democratic majority sweat out any close vote. The system got abused by dozens of lawmakers in each party, some of whom used proxy voting just so they could head home on earlier flights.

Some Republicans skipped town to attend a conservative political conference, voting by proxy, while Democrats flew on Air Force One with President Joe Biden and voted by proxy that day.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a constitutional law professor, said courts have always deferred to Congress in setting its own internal rules. He likens the GOP’s fierce opposition to wearing masks during the pandemic to how they latched on to proxy voting as a critical constitutional matter.

“If [Trump] had said, this is a Patriot mask and people who don’t wear this are Chinese spies, and he put it on, then they’d all be wearing masks and beating up people who weren’t wearing it,” Raskin told reporters Thursday. “So it’s almost random. They just decided because the Democrats took the responsible position, and had proxy voting, they would oppose it. And then suddenly it becomes a matter of principle for them.”

Luna, 35, and Pettersen, 43, both first took office in January 2023 after battles over mask-wearing, proxy voting and other pandemic matters had faded. They simply want to modify the rules in light of how many more young women are engaged in politics.

“The argument here is that if you want representation that truly reflects the American people,” Luna told reporters on Thursday, “you want young working parents.”

Luna knows exactly how small a group she was a part of when she gave birth as a member of Congress in 2023: “I was .00012 percent to ever give birth in U.S. history. I mean, like, literally one of 12.”

Two more sitting lawmakers have given birth since, including Pettersen earlier this year. Twice in the last five weeks, when important bills came down to very close make-or-break margins, Pettersen flew with her son, Samuel, to be on hand for Democrats in the Capitol. She has otherwise worked from her district outside Denver.

Wasserman Schultz has tracked the issue closely. In 2005, there were just 14 women in Congress with school-age children; now there are 37.

She views Johnson’s unabashed attacks on proxy voting as the same type of bias that she faced in 2004.

“This is nothing less than an anti-family, honestly sexist, narrow, narrow, ancient worldview that discriminates against families,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Luna disagrees with that perception of the speaker, who is 53 and whose wife, Kelly, gave birth to four children while working as a teacher and pastoral counselor. Luna thinks Johnson doesn’t fully understand the rigors of pregnancy and giving birth.

“I don’t think he’s a sexist,” she told reporters. “He’s a dad. So I literally had to sit there and explain my complications with birth.”

Johnson believes that offering proxy voting for new parents would lead to more exemptions for other hardships, such as for a member who has a complicated illness, or for one with a spouse or child battling a disease.

“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,” he said.

That little quip, however, has masked just how hard the leadership is fighting Luna. In the coming days, Johnson’s deputies will probably try to effectively spike Luna’s successful discharge petition.

In addition, she told reporters on Thursday that unnamed representatives on Johnson’s behalf have offered her some carrots if she simply backed down.

“I’m not going to be bought. I will tell you that I’ve now been reached out to multiple times, offering me positions on different committees, and I don’t want it because this is bigger than me,” she said.

At that moment her ally, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), joined the conversation to explain how emissaries for Johnson had offered to fast track some of his legislation if he opposed Luna.

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

The Senate has seen a surge in women over the past two decades, with 26 now serving in the upper chamber, but Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) is the only one to give birth while in the Senate. So these issues have not yet ripened for senators, other than passing a rule to allow Duckworth to bring her child onto the floor so she could cast votes.

Raskin noted how Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) gave his voting card to another colleague and voted by proxy earlier this year as he instead flew out to California to appear on a political chat show.

“Why aren’t they demanding a censure of Donalds for having voted illegally under their rule? I mean, that’s amazing,” he said.

Luna’s coalition of Republicans, from the far-right Burchett to the moderate Lawler, suggests that if she can defeat the procedural maneuvers Johnson is trying, her bill will get a huge majority if it comes to a vote.

“I will be successful and you will see many other Republicans join us,” she said.

Read the whole story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/29/congress-proxy-voting-gop/