Speaker Mike Johnson has reached an agreement with Republican holdouts that will effectively kill a bipartisan effort to change House rules so that lawmakers could temporarily vote remotely immediately after the birth of a child.
Instead, Mr. Johnson has committed to allowing a convoluted arrangement to give a narrow group of lawmakers — women who face medical complications after childbirth that prevent them from being present in Washington — a way of registering their position on some legislation in their absence without actually being able to vote.
The maneuver, known as “vote pairing,” would not require a rule change and is a far cry from allowing new parents in Congress to fully participate in legislating. But it will allow Mr. Johnson to dispense with an issue that had exposed a deep cultural rift among House Republicans and temporarily paralyzed President Trump’s legislative agenda.
The agreement came after Mr. Johnson persuaded Mr. Trump, who initially said he supported proxy voting for new mothers, to back him in opposition to the practice, which was vehemently opposed by the speaker and a sizable contingent of hard-right Republicans.
Republicans have long asserted that proxy voting — when lawmakers who are not at the Capitol can designate a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf — is unconstitutional and destroys the fabric of the institution of Congress, which requires lawmakers to convene in person.
“If you aren’t capable of doing the job your constituents sent you to do, then you should step aside and let someone else do it,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said last week as she argued against any form of proxy voting.
The maneuver that Mr. Johnson proposed, which has been used in the Senate for more than a century, allows an absent member to form a “live pair” with a lawmaker who is present and had planned to take the opposing position on a bill. The member who is in the chamber agrees to vote “present,” thus canceling out the vote of the absent one, and announces for the record how the absent member would have voted.
The arrangement is unlikely to give absent mothers much opportunity to influence what happens in the House. Because the practice is fully voluntary, it would be unlikely to occur on any legislation whose fate was truly in doubt. On a bill where the speaker could not afford to lose a vote on his side, it would be exceedingly difficult to find a member of either party willing to pair with a colleague who held the opposite position.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who has been agitating for over a year for proxy voting for new parents, tried to claim a small victory even as she appeared to cave on her animating issue.
She credited Mr. Trump with helping her come to an agreement with Mr. Johnson, saying the deal would extend to all members who were unable to vote because of medical emergencies or other extenuating circumstances.
“This is becoming the most modern, pro-family Congress we’ve ever seen,” Ms. Luna wrote on social media.
Democrats who had partnered with Ms. Luna on the issue, however, said they were deeply disappointed with the agreement and did not plan to support it.
“Our shared goal has been to support new parents so they can do their jobs and vote on behalf of their constituents while also taking care of themselves and their families,” said Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California. “This ‘deal’ falls short of that goal — silencing new parents and perpetuating the status quo and the notion that Congress is ineffective and obsolete.”
The agreement came a week after Mr. Johnson tried and failed to use strong-arm tactics to block the proxy voting measure, which had the support of a bipartisan majority of members, from getting a vote, leading to an embarrassing defeat for him on the House floor.
After Mr. Johnson canceled House business for the week last Tuesday, it was not clear how he would get out of the predicament, which only seemed to intensify after Mr. Trump told reporters flying with him aboard Air Force One that he supported the idea of allowing new parents to vote remotely.
It was a rare moment of daylight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson, who typically relies on the president to keep his fractious conference united and does so by showing him unconditional loyalty. But Mr. Johnson appeared to change the president’s mind, writing on social media that he had connected with the president immediately after his statement, and that Mr. Trump had said to him, “Mike, you have my proxy on proxy voting.”
That also helped force Ms. Luna to stand down.
Democrats still have the option this week of forging ahead with their discharge petition — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of the proxy voting measure. But since Ms. Luna struck the deal with Mr. Johnson, the Republicans who had supported the proposal are expected to stay united, ensuring its defeat on the House floor.
Still, it would be a way to force Republicans to go on the record with a position that appears to be at odds with many voters who view proxy voting in Congress as a common-sense approach to modernizing an institution whose practices are lagging behind those of most American workplaces.
Paid Leave for All, a national campaign of organizations, on Monday released findings from a rapid message test it conducted that showed that hearing about Mr. Johnson’s move to block proxy voting increased support for the measure by up to 23 points.
Mr. Johnson was aware of the optics of appearing to be standing in the way of sympathetic young mothers.
“I am actively working on every possible accommodation to make Congressional service simpler for young mothers,” he wrote on social media as he defended his position. Later, he told reporters that he wanted to create easily accessible nursing room facilities, which have existed on Capitol Hill for nearly two decades.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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