Cnn
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President Mike Johnson underwent an embarrassing defeat on Tuesday on the ground while nine of his own GOP members landed a procedural vote on a measure that many considered the anti-family.
The measure was procedural, but would have enabled party leaders to change the rules of the chamber to prevent new parents in the congress from voting remotely.
Johnson was trying to kill a surge of her compatriot of the GOP, Anna Paulina Luna, who was inspired by her own difficulty in going to Washington when she recovered from birth and had a newborn baby. But Luna led her own successful campaign to defeat Johnson’s efforts.
The question was the GOP in the Chamber while several legislators accuse the speaker of being anti-family in private.
Johnson and Luna fought for months during the thrust of the Florida Congress to allow the voting by procurement for the parents of newborns – an effort that started after giving birth last year and could not vote for weeks. But the institutionalist republican fiercely rejected this push, forcing Luna to choose the most controversial approach to work with the Democrats.
Johnson and his management team faced a rebellion in their own party as they jostle to kill Luna’s measure before being able to arrive upstairs, where it is almost certain to succeed.
“We are not going to let him come to the ground,” said Johnson to journalists when he asked him questions about the discharge petition. The Louisiana republican said that he had spoken “on several occasions” with Luna about the question – including a meeting in her office on Tuesday morning – but they could not find a way to go.
“The speaker’s work is to protect the institution,” said Johnson.
Johnson’s position arouses complaints from his entire GOP conference, many of which see his position as anti-family in a congress which includes more and more young parents. The president of the GOP argued that the proxy vote is unconstitutional, although he has personally participated in the practice when he was authorized under Nancy Pelosi of the time, during the cocovio pandemic.
The subject of proxy vote dominated a controversial meeting of the GOP conference on Tuesday morning, according to several republican sources familiar with the discussions. In a tense moment, the representative of the GOP Nick Lalota – a father of three children – spoke to note that the Republicans used the rules to modify the rules, according to two participants.
Leaving the meeting, Johnson said he would continue with his plan to block the Luna bill by the language by folding in a separate rule. But other GOP leaders have even refused to discuss it.
“We don’t whip the rules and I’m not talking about rules, okay?” The whip of the majority of the house, Tom Emmer, told CNN by leaving the meeting.
Luna told colleagues that she had at least four Republicans who would vote against the rule, according to a person familiar with her whip operation. But it is not yet clear how many Republicans are ready to make Johnson jostle on the ground.
Luna recently faced her own political drama on this subject. She left Freedom Caucus this week after the ultra -conservative group mainly refused to support her discharge petition.
There is another reason why some Republicans want Johnson to authorize the vote by proxy: the mathematics of the house.
Johnson’s margins are so tight that President Donald Trump suddenly decided to keep the representative Elise Stefanik in the house instead of adding it to his office. And yet, Johnson rejects a measure which would give him a certain flexibility when the legislators cannot attend votes because they have newborns at home.
A GOP legislator, the representative Kat Cammack, is pregnant and at least the other, the representative Brandon Gil of Texas, soon awaits a child with his spouse.
The question of proxy vote is personal for certain Republicans.
In a private conversation discussing the case on Monday, the GOP representative, Wesley Hunt, told Johnson that it was his “greater regret in life” that he had traveled Washington 16 times while his son was seriously ill in the neonatal intensive care unit and his wife was in the USI, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Hunt plans to bring his son, now toddler, to the ground later Tuesday to protest against Johnson’s decision on the issue of proxy voting. Hunt is part of a dozen republicans of the house who signed Luna’s discharge petition.
While the leaders of the GOP do not generally fuck on the procedural measures known as rules of rules, Johnson and the Chip Roy representative of Texas have personally called the Republican members to whip them against Luna’s proposal, according to a person familiar with awareness.
If the leaders of the GOP do nothing, the Luna discharge petition would be forced upstairs this week.
Manu Raju and Haley Talbot of CNN contributed to this report.
