The U.S. House on Tuesday rebuked House Republican leadership, voting down a measure that would have blocked a bipartisan effort to make serving in Congress easier for new parents. 

House Republicans had attempted to use a vote to proceed on unrelated bills to kill a resolution on proxy voting. The resolution allows new parents in the House to designate another member to vote for them for 12 weeks after welcoming a child or before birth if health circumstances limit a member’s ability to travel. But in a stunning defeat for House Speaker Mike Johnson and House GOP leadership, a group of Republican members joined with Democrats to vote that down. 

The resolution is sponsored by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a Republican, and Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, a Democrat. They worked to circumvent House leadership and force a vote on their resolution by using a rarely successful move known as a discharge petition, which gained the support of half of the members of the chamber. 

Republicans put the provision to kill the discharge petition as part of a package of bills including the SAVE Act, an unrelated GOP-backed bill supporters say would stop illegal noncitizen voting, which is already unlawful.

The rule failed 222-206 with nine Republicans including Luna opposing it. The result — the first time a rule vote has failed in this Congress — is a rebuke of GOP leaders, led by Johnson, who vigorously opposed Luna’s discharge petition and sought to block it from being voted on by the full House.  

Both Luna and Pettersen took the House floor Tuesday to oppose the rule.

“I would also ask my colleagues to remember up until 1916, female representation was not a common thing in Washington, D.C,” Luna said. “I urge all of my colleagues to give this a fair shot, vote no against the rule, allow this to come to the floor for the first time, I’d say, in congressional history.”

Pettersen, who was holding her nine-week-old baby, Sam, said she was faced with an “impossible decision” to either travel to Washington with a vulnerable newborn or stay in Colorado and temporarily leave her constituents without a vote. 

“It is unfathomable that in 2025, we have not modernized Congress to address these unique challenges that members face, these life events, where our voices should still be heard,” Pettersen said. 

The move by House leadership was meant to pressure Luna and other Republicans to abandon her discharge petition. “They’re basically putting a gun to her head,” Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York said Monday. 

Luna told reporters Monday evening that she would oppose the rule for the SAVE Act if it would kill her petition. 

“They are trying to paint me as someone that does not support election integrity,” she said. “If you guys pull my voting record, I’m one of the top 10 most conservative members of Congress, so it’s just ridiculous to me that they would even do that.” 

Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Republican chair of the Rules Committee, argued Tuesday morning that  allowing proxy voting would hurt the integrity of Congress. 

“According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Congress is defined as ‘the act of coming together and meeting,’” she said. “I’ve never voted by proxy because I believe it undermines the fabric of that sacred act of convening. I know there’s a new laptop class in America that seems to operate increasingly in a virtual space, but that’s simply not a fact of life for most of American workers.” 

Democrats on the committee decried the attempt to block the proxy voting petition as an anti-democratic power play by leadership to thwart the will of the majority. 

“This rule is unprecedented. Never in the history of the House has the Rules Committee acted to outright kill a discharge petition that was already signed by a majority of the House,” said Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the committee. “So you’re making history.” 

“This is not only unprecedented, this is shameful,” McGovern added. 

Both Luna and Pettersen, who are among only a handful of House members who have given birth in office, missed votes after having their children. They teamed up with Reps. Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, and Sara Jacobs of California, a Democrat, to sponsor  a resolution to allow proxy voting for new parents. Proxy voting was widely used by members of both political parties during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Republicans sued to stop the practice and ended it altogether when they took back control of the U.S. House in 2023.  

Johnson and House GOP leadership have vigorously opposed the proxy voting effort, arguing that the practice would be unconstitutional, concerns Luna and Pettersen say they have neutralized with their resolution’s language.

“We sympathize with our colleagues who face circumstances that prevent them from being present, but proxy voting raises serious constitutional questions,” House Republican leaders said in a statement last week. “It also changes more than two and a half centuries of tradition, abuses the system, and creates the risk of a slippery slope toward more and more members casting votes remotely.”

It was nearly 130 years after the drafting of the Constitution that Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress in 1916, three years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote — a right that was still restricted for many women of color. It wasn’t until 1973 that Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first member of Congress to give birth in office.

Luna and Pettersen utilized a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition to circumvent House leadership and the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what items of legislation make it to the House floor. Discharge petitions have, historically, rarely been successful because they require signatures from a majority of House members. Their discharge petition received signatures from 218 members, including 11 Republicans, setting it up for a vote on the House floor, where it would need a simple majority to pass.  

Johnson and GOP leaders sought to find a way to derail the petition from making it to the floor, including meeting with Luna late last week in hopes of persuading her to back down and pull the resolution. But Luna remained steadfast in support of it getting to the floor, leading leadership to turn to the Rules Committee.  

The discharge petition has also caused friction within the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of hardline conservatives of which Luna was a member. On Monday Luna announced her departure from the caucus. In a letter to her Republican colleagues, she charged that Johnson, who is presiding over a razor-thin majority in the House, was being “blackmailed” by fellow Freedom Caucus members who oppose proxy voting.

“Supporting female representation and new families is not a fringe issue — it is a cornerstone of a vibrant, representative Congress,” she wrote.