How bipartisan lawmakers are pushing Congress to update its voting rules for new parents

(CNN) — When the House of Representatives was sworn in on January 3, Brittany Pettersen was pushing her luck in being there.

The Colorado Democrat was just three weeks away from giving birth to her son, Sam, which she wanted to do in her congressional district with her family, not in Washington.

So when she returned home a few days after the 119th Congress began, she stayed.

“I had hit the point where, you know, medical professionals tell you not to fly. It’s too dangerous, and airlines won’t let you on the plane when you’re that close to your due date,” Pettersen recalled.

She missed 41 House votes between leaving to give birth and racing back with her newborn for a crucial budget vote on February 25 – which she cast with baby Sam cradled in her arms.

“Just taking them out, even going to the grocery store or something like that. You’re worried about germs, exposure, you’re worried about putting them in a car. So it was scary the first time that I flew with him,” Pettersen recalled.

She argues all those missed votes were unnecessary, and that she should have been allowed to vote by proxy, which current House rules prohibit.

“It’s about changing Congress and making it, you know, bringing it out of the dark ages and doing things that are in alignment with 2025, you know, we should be able to be parents and still represent our constituents,” Pettersen said while holding then 6-week-old Sam, who once again was spending time on the crowded House floor so that his mother could vote.

She teamed up with Republican Anna Paulina Luna to try to force a change in the House rules allowing new parents – mothers as well as fathers – to vote by proxy for up to 12 weeks around the birth of a baby.

Luna said lawmakers should not have to choose between recovery and bonding with their baby to come to Washington to vote. “We’re siloing it. It’s very specific. It is to female members who have given birth and male members who’ve just had a child, their spouse has given birth, and sometimes they need to be there for that recovery process,” explained Luna.

GOP leaders argue it’s unconstitutional and a slippery slope.

Luna began pushing her own Republican leaders for permission to vote by proxy during the last Congress, when she gave birth to her son Henry.

She said then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said it was unconstitutional, and now, Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of her GOP leadership team argue the same.

Johnson filed a brief with the US Supreme Court making that argument when House Democrats allowed proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic.

While Luna said she believes she came up with a way to craft permission for proxy voting, so that it would pass constitutional muster, her House GOP leaders say they don’t agree.

“We sympathize with our colleagues who face circumstances that prevent them from being present, but proxy voting raises serious constitutional questions. 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,” said Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Whip Tom Emmer and House Conference Chair Lisa McClain in a joint statement provided to CNN.

When it comes to the slippery slope, some who oppose the rules change say it’s not realistic to only allow proxy voting for new parents. What about lawmakers who are ill or otherwise have legitimate real-life excuses for not being able to come to the House floor to vote?

A ‘slap in the face’ for young lawmakers

Nevermind that she believes proxy voting for new parents is constitutional, Luna complains that GOP leaders’ opposition is politically “dumb.”

“I mean everything that we’ve campaigned on being pro-family, pro-life,” she said, going on to add that it is “a massive slap in the face.”

Republicans have been trying hard in recent years to recruit younger GOP women to run for Congress, and she says this hurts their case.

“When I’m talking to other women, specifically women that are professionals in the workforce, they’re like, ‘Wait, you can’t vote?’” she recalls.

“That might not seem like a big issue to a majority of Americans, but for people that have been in that circumstance, I mean, what does it tell other younger women who are wanting to run for office? You can’t vote because you have a baby? That’s so backwards and archaic,” Luna added.

Both women noted how important it is for parents with young children to have lawmakers serving in Congress who can relate to them.

“We have life events that happen and giving birth, having a baby, we wanna make sure that those members still have a voice in Congress because we don’t wanna lose the representation of parents who understand the struggles families are going through,” said Pettersen.

In a notoriously older Congress, these women say they feel like they are in the generational minority.

“My joke is that when you go to Congress in your 40s, you’re young again,” Pettersen deadpanned.

“They defend the status quo. It’s really difficult to change things and the justification is this is how we’ve always done it and this is how we’re gonna continue to do it and that’s why we need people that are willing to challenge that,” she said.

Forcing a vote to allow proxy voting

On March 11, Pettersen and Luna, along with other co-sponsors Reps. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, and Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat, gathered enough signatures on what is known as a discharge petition to circumvent House GOP leaders’ opposition and force a vote on allowing proxy voting for new parents. Eleven House Republicans bucked their leadership to sign it.

With discharge petitions, after seven legislative days, the measure can come for a vote on the House floor.

Pettersen told CNN they hope that means to vote to change the House rules in the next two weeks.

Luna, who has been a thorn in her leadership’s side before, has vowed to make other legislating more difficult if they try to block it – and with such a narrow GOP majority, every vote counts.

Luna is only the 12th woman in congressional history to give birth while in office. Pettersen is the 13th.

They don’t agree on much policy or politics, but they formed a bipartisan bond over their effort to be able to represent their constituents while also taking care of their own maternal health and that of their new babies.

“We couldn’t have done this without working together, and I’m so grateful to have this partnership and I, you know, to have the people that were willing to stand up and say this actually isn’t right, it doesn’t make sense and we’re gonna do what we need to … bring a vote to the floor, and we know that if it comes to the floor we have overwhelming bipartisan support,” said Pettersen.

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