A long-simmering fight over whether to allow members of Congress to vote remotely after the birth of a new child is coming to a head on Tuesday afternoon, when Speaker Mike Johnson’s behind-the-scenes efforts to quash the broadly popular change to the chamber’s rules will be tested on the House floor.
The quiet push from a bipartisan group of younger lawmakers and new parents started more than a year ago, when Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, began agitating for a change to House rules that would allow new mothers to designate a colleague to vote by proxy on their behalf for up to six weeks after giving birth. Ms. Luna landed on the idea after her own child was born.
There is no maternity or paternity leave for members of Congress, who can take time away from the office without sacrificing their pay but cannot vote if they are not physically in the Capitol. Proponents of the change have called it a common-sense fix to modernize Congress, where there are more women and more younger members than there were 200 years ago.
Democrats including Representatives Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, who gave birth to her second child earlier this year, and Sara Jacobs of Colorado joined Ms. Luna’s effort, expanding the resolution to include new fathers and up to 12 weeks of proxy voting during a parental leave.
But Mr. Johnson has adamantly opposed them at every turn, arguing that proxy voting is unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court refused to take up a Republican-led lawsuit challenging pandemic-era proxy voting rules in the House. Mr. Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allow members to vote without being physically at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and that it harms member collegiality.
“I do believe its an existential issue for this body,” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chairwoman of the Rules Committee, said on Tuesday. “Congress is defined as the ‘act of coming together and meeting.’” Changing that, she said, “undermines the fabric of that sacred act of convening.”
When Mr. Johnson refused to bring the bill to the floor, Ms. Luna and her cohorts successfully used a tool called the discharge petition — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of the measure.
But on Tuesday morning, Republicans on the House Rules Committee, often referred to as the “speaker’s committee” because the speaker uses it to maintain control of the floor, tried a tricky behind-the-scenes maneuver to kill the broadly popular effort.
They approved a measure that would block the proxy voting bill or any legislation on a similar topic from reaching the floor during the remainder of the Congress, effectively nullifying the discharge petition and closing off any chance for its supporters to secure a vote on the matter for the next two years.
G.O.P. lawmakers inserted it into an unrelated resolution to allow for a vote on the SAVE Act, legislation requiring people to prove their U.S. citizenship when they register to vote, in a bid to pressure Republicans to support it.
Democrats called the move an unprecedented attempt to shut down a crucial mechanism in the House for ensuring that measures that have majority support are voted upon.
“You guys are falling all over yourselves to block mothers with newborn babies from voting remotely,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “This is not only unprecedented, this is shameful.”
He admonished Republicans who support the measure: “Don’t help this committee kill something you support. This should not be a place where democracy goes to die.”
It was not clear Mr. Johnson could peel off enough Republicans to block the proxy voting bill, given that it has the backing of a majority of the House. A floor vote was scheduled for 1:30 p.m.
