Republican Stunts Screw Over New Parents in Congress
Listen, if you know me, you know that I am not impressed with the Republican Party’s treatment of children. That said, I am stunned that the GOP has chosen this hill to die on:
New moms (and dads) should not be allowed to vote in Congress if they cannot travel with their newborn baby.
Let’s break it down.
Last week Representatives Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) led a push to allow proxy voting for new parents, for 12 weeks after the birth of a child.
Pettersen made national news last month when she traveled from Colorado to Washington, DC with her 4-week-old infant so she could cast her vote on the Continuing Resolution. Paulina Luna gave birth to her first child in 2023. These two unlikely allies joined forces and whipped a bipartisan majority, which voted in support of their new rule last week.
Here’s where the GOP exposed their overwhelming anti-child, anti-family attitude. Only 8 Republicans supported the proxy rule, and Paulina Luna was the only woman who supported it. That’s right – every single other GOP mother in Congress voted against their own interests, including women’s rights “champion” and self-identified male lion Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
So it passed, right? Nope. Even with the majority of representatives supporting the proxy voting rule from Pettersen and Paulina Luna, Republicans found a way to kill it. Speaker Mike Johnson dramatically closed shop and ground all House business to a halt last week, which kind of made him look like a total weenie. Then yesterday, Johnson and Paulina Luna announced they’d struck a deal, supposedly encouraged by Trump.
And umm… it’s a really bad deal. The deal is that the proxy voting proposal is dead, and in its place any member of Congress can ask an opposing member from the other party to vote “present” on an issue they disagree on. WHAT??? On what planet do these people believe any sitting member of Congress would willingly give up their precious vote just to be nice to a member of the other party who wants to stay home with their newborn? It’s absurd.
Even more absurd? The way Anna Paulina Luna is pretending that the new rule is not in fact useless. Taking to twitter, she posted “Thanks to POTUS and his support of new moms being able to vote when recovering from child brith as well as those who worked hard to get these changes done.” And no, I did not misspell “birth”... that’s the actual text from her post.
Democrats and Brittany Pettersen were understandably disappointed.
It seemed like for once there would be bipartisan support for a commonsense rule to support parents and newborns in Congress, but at the end of the day even Anna Paulina Luna is just a pawn of Donald Trump. She lost her very personal battle for proxy voting, and then was forced to kiss the ring and thank the king for nothing in return.
Representative Pettersen vowed to continue fighting for proxy voting, citing the need to prioritize the wellbeing of newborns and new parents alike. The new mom told reporters “it’s so very out of touch with women in America.”
Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, and even Anna Paulina Luna should be ashamed of themselves. Congress came close to solving a real problem to help moms and their newborns, and GOP leadership fully tanked it. We all deserve better.