President Mike Johnson has concluded an agreement with the republican retained who will effectively kill a bipartite effort to change the rules of the chamber so that the legislators can temporarily vote after the birth of a child.
Instead, Johnson undertook to authorize an convoluted arrangement to give a close group of legislators – women who are facing medical complications after childbirth that prevent them from being present in Washington – a way to record their position on legislation in their absence without being able to really vote.
The maneuver, known as “twinning of votes”, would not require a change of rule and is far from allowing new parents to the congress to participate fully in the legislation. But this will allow Mr. Johnson to dispense with a problem that had exposed a deep cultural flaw among the Republicans of the Chamber and temporarily paralyzed the legislative program of President Trump.
The agreement took place after Mr. Johnson persuaded Trump, who initially declared that he had supported the vote by proxy for the new mothers, to support him in opposition to the practice, which was vehemently by the president and a considerable contingent of harsh republicans.
Republicans have long said that proxy vote – when legislators who are not in the Capitol can designate a colleague to vote on their behalf – is unconstitutional and destroys the fabric of the Congress Institution, which obliges legislators to meet in person.
“If you are not able to do the work that your voters have sent you, then you should withdraw and let someone else do it,” said Republican Greene, republican of Georgia, last week.
The maneuver that Johnson proposed, which has been used in the Senate for more than a century, allows an absent member to form a “living pair” with a legislator who is present and had planned to take the opposite position on a bill. The member who is in the House agrees to vote “present”, thus canceling the vote of the absence, and announces the file how the absent member would have voted.
It is unlikely that the arrangement gives mothers absent many possibilities to influence what is happening at home. Because the practice is fully voluntary, it would be unlikely that it will happen on any legislation whose fate was really in doubt. On a bill where the president could not afford to lose a vote on his side, it would be extremely difficult to find a member of one or the other party ready to join a colleague who occupied the opposite position.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who has been acting for more than a year to vote by proxy for the new parents, tried to win a small victory even if she seemed to engrave on her animation number.
She credited Mr. Trump to have helped him reach an agreement with Mr. Johnson, saying that the agreement would extend to all members who could not vote due to medical emergency or other extenuating circumstances.
“It becomes the most modern and most familiar congress we have ever seen,” Ms. Luna wrote on social networks.
The Democrats who had teamed up with Ms. Luna on the issue, however, said that they were deeply disappointed with the agreement and had not planned to support him.
“Our common goal was to support new parents so that they can do their jobs and vote on behalf of their voters while taking care of themselves and their families,” said representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California. “This” agreement “does not make this objective – to silence new parents and perpetuate the status quo and the idea that the congress is ineffective and obsolete.”
The agreement took place a week after Mr. Johnson tried and failed to use strong arms tactics to block the proxy voting measure, which underwent the support of a bipartite majority of the members, of obtaining a vote, leading to an embarrassing defeat for him on the room of the room.
After Mr. Johnson canceled the business of the house for last Tuesday, he was not clear how he would withdraw from the difficult situation, which seemed only to intensify after Mr. Trump told journalists with him on board the Air Force One that he supported the idea of authorizing the new parents to vote at a distance.
It was a rare moment of daylight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson, who is generally based on the president to keep his fractive conference and does so by showing him unconditional loyalty. But Johnson seemed to change his opinion of the president, writing on social networks 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 vote.”
It also helped to force Ms. Luna to withdraw.
The Republicans also planned to block any capacity that Democrats should go ahead with their discharge petition – a request signed by 218 members of the Chamber, the majority of the organization – to force the examination of the proxy measure. They planned to deposit the petition so that it could not reach the soil of the Chamber for a vote which would show them in contradiction with many voters, who consider the vote by proxy as a common sense approach to modernize an institution whose practices are lagging behind most American workplaces.
Leave paid for all, a national campaign of organizations, published the results of a quick message test on Monday that he performed that showed that Hear talking about Mr. Johnson’s decision to block proxy vote, increased support for the measure up to 23 points.
Mr. Johnson was aware of the optics to appear to stand for young sympathetic mothers.
“I actively work on all possible accommodation to simplify the Congress Service for young mothers,” he wrote on social networks while he defended his position. Later, he told journalists that he wanted to create easily accessible nursing room facilities, which existed in Capitol Hill for almost two decades.