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.
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