Luna: Johnson blocked proxy voting for new moms

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that Speaker Mike Johnson has blocked her proposal to allow new mothers to vote by proxy for several months from being included in the rules package for the next Congress.

“Today, after speaking with @SpeakerJohnson about this for months, I was told, He will not support allowing female members to vote if they give birth,” she wrote in a thread on X. “Among other things, this is something that I fundamentally disagree with him on.”

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he has backup from other corners of the Republican conference.

“I don’t give a crap who you are or whether you just had a baby in the last six weeks,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said on “CR Podcast with Daniel Horowitz.” “It is unconstitutional to proxy vote.”

Luna has been leading the charge throughout the year, beginning her bipartisan push in January to allow new moms to vote remotely in order to spend more time with their newborns.

Proxy voting was used in the then-Democratic controlled House during the pandemic, but faced legal challenges and staunch opposition from Republicans who decried it as unconstitutional.