alfapg G.O.P. Leaders Can’t Do Even Easy Pro-Family Policy in Congress

data de lançamento:2025-04-02 06:59    tempo visitado:121

There will be headlines on Tuesday about Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, embarrassing House Speaker Mike Johnson, but it’s worth really digging into the substance of the issue at hand.

Luna has long been a proponent of giving new parents in Congress some flexibility and wanted to change congressional rules to allow them to vote by proxy. Johnson didn’t support her. So she and a bipartisan group of allies — including Brittany Pettersen, Democrat of Colorado — used a procedural maneuver called a discharge petition to allow the entire House of Representatives to vote on the matter. Johnson did everything in his power to stop it and lost on Tuesday.

As my newsroom colleague Annie Karni explained, Johnson went above and beyond to kill the legislation by putting forth “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.” But Johnson’s effort failed, with a small group of Republicans joining all Democrats in voting no. Afterward, Republicans canceled votes for the rest of the week, and leaders appear to still be considering ways to defeat Luna’s proposal.

The reasons for this intense opposition from Republicans are a little hard to pin down: Though Johnson claims that proxy voting is unconstitutional, there’s a lot of disagreement on that,66jogo.com even from his own party. He and other Republicans have also argued that it’s a slippery slope to too many members skipping in-person votes or voting by A.I. “I get that if you’re expecting and having a child, you want to be here, but that’s your choice,” Representative Ralph Norman told Roll Call. “When you enter Congress, you enter it to serve, and I don’t know where you stop it.”

I don’t think the slippery-slope argument holds water, because the bill’s language narrowly permits proxy voting for just 12 weeks for a “member who has given birth or whose spouse has given birth.”

This also seems like a silly fight to pick at a time when the Republican majority is razor thin. The G.O.P. could use a headline that makes it seem even slightly pro-labor (while firing thousands of people and enforcing a hard return-to-office policy without enough desks or toilet paper) or pro-family (while threatening food stamps and Medicaid). Proxy voting for new parents could have been an easy win that made Republicans look even vaguely human.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

The amendment, Proposition 139, would establish a fundamental right to abortion and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion before viability — the point at which a fetus can survive outside the uterus, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.alfapg