(WASHINGTON) — With the House of Representatives at a standstill, Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to fold on his strong opposition to allowing new parents in Congress to vote remotely.
“I don’t concede on something that I believe to be unconstitutional. I can’t. I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. So, we’re going to find a path through this. We’re working on that,” Johnson said Wednesday. “I talked to everybody who voted against the rule, and we’ll work it out. So, we got time to do it, and those conversations continue.”
Earlier this week, nine Republicans sided with Democrats to torpedo a procedural rule that included language to kill Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s bipartisan discharge petition on proxy voting for new lawmaker parents.
The vote has thrown the House into disarray and paralyzed the chamber, leaving Johnson to find a way to break the impasse. The vote also called into question Johnson’s ability to control Republicans’ razor-thin majority.
House Republican leaders, including Johnson, had said they would take the unprecedented step to block Luna’s petition on proxy voting, which gives both mothers and fathers the ability to vote remotely up to 12 weeks after the birth of a child.
After the vote, Johnson said because it failed, “we can’t have any further action on the floor this week.” The rule that lawmakers voted on included language to block proxy voting — as well as other pieces of legislation.
“The reason that I said that the agenda was taken out for the week is because it was, it was all in one rule. We could have run the SAVE Act, but the rest of it would have to have been done in a different rule. And I had a big group of House Republicans who did not want to support a rule until we took care of the proxy voting situation,” he claimed.
Johnson said he is “actively working” to accommodate young mothers serving in Congress.
“While I understand the pure motivations of the few Republican proxy vote advocates, I simply cannot support the change they seek,” Johnson wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “The procedural vote yesterday was our effort to advance President Trump’s important legislative agenda while disabling a discharge petition that would force proxy voting and open a dangerous Pandora’s box for the institution.”
“To allow proxy voting for one category of Members would open the door for many others, and ultimately result in remote voting that would harm the operation of our deliberative body and diminish the critical role of the legislative branch,” he added.
Johnson said that he wants a room for mothers to nurse right off the House floor even though there is currently one in the basement of the Capitol. He said leaders are also looking at allowing the use of government money for members to fly their infant babies to D.C. with their mothers and fathers.
“We want to accommodate mothers who want to serve in Congress, and we’re the pro-family party, so we’ll do that, but we can’t do something that violates the Constitution or destroys the institution you serve,” he said.
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