Two moms brought business on the floor of the House of Representatives to a grinding halt on Tuesday over their push to allow remote voting for new parents.
"We said don't f*** with moms," Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., said on the steps of the U.S. Capitol alongside Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla.
"We worked as a team," Luna said. "And I think that today is a pretty historical day for the entire conference and showing that the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington and also to the importance of female members having a vote in Washington, D.C."
Luna and Pettersen have been working to pass legislation that would allow new parents to vote by proxy for 12 weeks around the birth of a new child. Luna tried several different tactics to get the bipartisan bill to the floor. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., originally refused to put the bill on the floor. So Luna teamed up with Democrats to bypass the speaker and force a vote.
When it became clear they had the 218 votes needed to do that, Johnson still tried to stop them. He took the unusual step of designing a special rule to prevent a vote, but nine Republicans voted alongside Democrats to block it.
Afterwards, Johnson told reporters that votes for the rest of the week were canceled.
"The agenda has been taken off the table," Johnson said on his way out of the Capitol.
In the hours leading up to the vote, Johnson argued that proxy voting "would do great violence to the institution — to reopen Pandora's box."
He maintained that proxy voting is "unconstitutional and there's no limiting principle."
"If you allow it for some situations, you're ultimately going to have to allow it for all," he said. "And I think that destroys the deliberative nature of the body."
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