Mike Johnson’s humiliating loss shows how weak he is without Trump

House Speaker Mike Johnson suffered a humiliating blow from his own caucus on Tuesday when he failed to kill a proposal that would have allowed lawmakers who have just given birth to delegate a colleague to cast votes on their behalf.

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, was so put off by his tactical loss that he sent everyone in Congress home early for the week. The bizarre decision to tell all of his colleagues to pack it in was a rather obvious attempt to divert attention from his failure to control the chamber.

Last year Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R- Fla., who gave birth to a son in 2023, began to advocate for a House policy that would allow new mothers to appoint a colleague to vote on their behalf during the first six weeks after birth. There is currently no parental leave policy in Congress, and voting must be done in person. Luna’s effort evolved as she worked with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, and the rule change movement has become a call for both new mothers and fathers to be able to exercise proxy voting for up to 12 weeks. But a major obstacle stood in her way: The leader of her own party in the House is strongly opposed to proxy voting, and has argued that it’s unconstitutional and would be a slippery slope to an overly lax attitude toward proxy voting.

Luna had a plan to force a vote on the issue this week and use a special maneuver to circumvent Johnson. She collected 218 “discharge petition” signatures, including from 11 Republicans, which allows her to bring the legislation directly to the floor without Johnson’s backing. But Johnson then sought to pre-empt this with a special maneuver of his own: He used what The New York Times described as an “unprecedented parliamentary maneuver” to close off her path to forcing the vote. Except it didn’t work.

As NBC News reports, it “failed 206-222, with nine Republicans bucking Johnson and voting with all 213 Democrats.” Notably, some of the Republicans who joined Luna in killing Johnson’s effort in that vote were not even signatories to her petition.

The outcome is embarrassing for Johnson, who used a strong-arm tactic to try to quell a mutiny over a relatively low-stakes issue, and then failed. Johnson was immediately pouty: As he left the chamber he told reporters, “That rule being brought down means that we can’t have any further action on the floor this week.”

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Johnson’s move appears to have left a bitter taste in the mouth of some of his colleagues. Axios reports that “several GOP lawmakers expressed a feeling that the speaker was being heavy-handed in trying to override the will of a majority of the House.” Meanwhile Luna felt emboldened, calling it a “historical day.” And Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., who was the lead author of the bill, said her message to the speaker was: “Don’t f— with moms.” It also doesn’t speak highly of Johnson’s level of power in his party if he failed the first time he tried to pull off a major legislative move without Trump’s backing. Johnson’s decision to end business in Congress for the week came off as a transparent bid to avoid admitting defeat.

On a policy level, the demands of Luna, Pettersen and their allies in calling for 12 weeks of proxy voting seems sensible. Why would calling for parental-leave proxy voting lead to a “slippery slope” wherein proxy voting is abused endlessly? The rule change would be time-restricted and based on very specific, rare and important extenuating circumstances. And it would reflect an acknowledgement of the evolving cultural norms surrounding parenthood in the modern workforce.

Then again, it is entirely apropos that Johnson would be unswayed by such arguments. The U.S., is after all, a global outlier in its refusal to mandate paid parental leave. As the Republican Party puts all its energy into attacking social programs that help vulnerable people, it would look rather odd for Johnson to seem supportive of young parents.