Grounded in Colorado ahead of birth, Rep. Brittany Pettersen is still fighting for proxy change

WASHINGTON — Brittany Pettersen hasn’t slept well lately, moving around tends to be painful, and the Capitol is roughly 1,600 miles away.

“I’m so grateful not to be waddling my way through the airport,” the Colorado Democrat, now in her third trimester of pregnancy, said last week after announcing that she was no longer able to fly to Washington ahead of her due date.

Being at home is in many ways a relief to Pettersen, who came to Congress in 2023. But according to House rules, it also means she had to make the difficult choice between having her child in Colorado and representing her constituents by casting votes.

So she’s continuing a fight — led by members like her and Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna — to allow new parents to vote by proxy for up to 12 weeks and to make Congress a more family-friendly place. The effort has drawn pushback from House GOP leadership, prompting the bipartisan group to explore other options, including a discharge petition, to force a vote on a resolution they introduced earlier this month.

“If we want regular people represented in Congress, the needs of families and the issues that they’re facing currently ... we have to change the systems,” Pettersen said.

Proxy voting has been controversial since it was implemented by the Democrat-controlled House in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans opposed the change from the jump, though, like their Democratic colleagues, they used it in large numbers.

The policy at the time allowed lawmakers to designate a colleague to vote on their behalf if they were unable to physically attend because of the public health emergency, and it contributed to record-setting vote participation in the House. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, agree it was abused.

Republicans did away with proxy voting entirely when they took the House majority in the 118th Congress. And despite Luna’s pleas, Speaker Mike Johnson has declined to act on a carveout for parents.

“I started by requesting it to be placed into the rules package [for the 119th Congress]. Then I asked for him to allow it to come to the floor via the Rules Committee as a stand-alone,” Luna said, adding that when those efforts failed, she turned to the idea of a discharge petition, which could bring it to the floor over the objections of leadership.

“And by the way, it’s going to pass,” said Luna, who had a child in 2023, her first year in the House.

‘Narrow application’

Last Congress, Luna sought a pared-down plan that would have granted up to six weeks of proxy voting for mothers who have just given birth. The latest proposal takes a slightly more expansive view, allowing up to 12 weeks of proxy voting on the House floor and in committees for both recent mothers and fathers. Pettersen, however, hopes the proposal is limited enough to attract skeptics.

“The narrow application is what I’m after,” said former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from Washington state, who co-wrote an op-ed in Newsweek this month supporting the proxy push. “Immediately people are like, ‘It was abused during covid,’ and it was. It was ridiculous. … But for us to be good representatives, we also have to tend to the most important relationships in our lives.”

Herrera Beutler served in the House for over a decade and had all three of her children while she was a member. She remembers it as a place that at times was not conducive to having a family.

She arrived at House votes and events with her young children in tow. Once, she brought her kids into the cloakroom off the House floor, where another member was smoking. “I remember somebody going, ‘Why are you bringing those kids in here?’ And I was like, ‘Why are you smoking in here?’ Like, I gotta do my job,” Herrera Beutler said.

Early in her congressional career, her oldest child was born with a serious medical condition that required a hospital stay, forcing Herrera Beutler to choose between her ailing daughter and traveling to the Capitol for votes.

“There has to be strong guardrails that are enforced … I don’t want to see it abused,” she said. “But members should have the ability to still vote without making it a choice between their child’s hospital bedside and voting.”

Only around a dozen women have given birth while serving in Congress, with Pettersen set to join them. And some say it can be challenging for new dads, too.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., a co-sponsor of Pettersen’s resolution whose wife gave birth to a daughter eight days before the election last fall, said having to return to work so soon after “had a tremendous impact on the family.” He also stressed he was not advocating for unlimited proxy voting, but for a limited exception.

“I believe people should be here in person,” Lawler said. “But you can promulgate rules to restrict it, for a certain time period or for certain reasons.”

Johnson opposed

Johnson, however, appears unmoved. Earlier this month, Johnson told CNN that while he sympathized with “all of our young women legislators who are of birthing age,” he remains convinced that proxy voting is “unconstitutional.” Through a spokesperson this week, he declined to comment further.

During the pandemic, Republicans sued unsuccessfully to stop the practice, and the Supreme Court in 2022 ultimately opted not to take up a case led by then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Another lawsuit, claiming that legislation passed with many proxy votes as part of the 2023 spending package violated the Constitution’s Quorum Clause, is ongoing in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rep. Jim McGovern, ranking member on the House Rules Committee and another co-sponsor of the proxy voting resolution, doesn’t buy the unconstitutional argument, noting that Johnson voted by proxy on numerous occasions during the pandemic.

“I’m the one who actually wrote the proxy rule, and I never once voted proxy during the entire COVID because I never really had occasion to,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “But people like him, they used it for convenience. … And now he’s saying it’s unconstitutional? That’s absurd. It’s embarrassing that he would say that.”

Pettersen and Luna both believe their legislation, which would explicitly prohibit the use of proxy votes to establish a quorum, sidesteps concerns related to the practice’s constitutionality. Both also believe there is broad, bipartisan support for the measure, which has 60 co-sponsors so far.

But rules around discharge petitions set a high bar to circumvent leadership and bring the resolution to the floor. The pair would need to collect the signatures of a majority of the House. Luna circulated a discharge petition last fall for her six-week proposal, but got only six signatures, according to the House clerk’s website.

Timing is also a factor. A discharge petition can’t begin circulating until 30 legislative days after the measure is introduced and referred to a committee, meaning the effort, even if successful, may not help Pettersen. But she’s committed to changing the rule nonetheless.

Meanwhile, she’s staying busy in Colorado. As of last week Pettersen was no longer doing events, but she was taking meetings and continuing to beat the drum on the proxy voting issue.

“I am going to prioritize the health and well-being of my newborn, and I know that my constituents overwhelmingly support me in that decision,” Pettersen said. “It feels really unfair, because I should not be precluded from doing my job just because I’m giving birth.”