Johnson, Luna struck a deal to end their feud over remote voting for new parents. Democrats are still pushing the point

By Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox and Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN

(CNN) — House Speaker Mike Johnson successfully stopped an effort by fellow Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to allow new parents in Congress to vote remotely.

But her House Democratic partners made clear Tuesday that they still want that vote — even if it’s now symbolic.

Democratic Reps. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado and Sara Jacobs of California — who teamed up with Luna on a discharge petition on the matter — formally noticed it on the floor Tuesday afternoon.

It’s a rare step that would typically require the full House to soon take up the measure, forcing all members to go on record in a vote. But in this case, it will not succeed. That’s because Johnson and Luna recently agreed to kill the effort — tucking language into an unrelated measure that would prevent the bill from coming up under that discharge petition tool. Luna announced over the weekend that she and Johnson had struck a deal on proxy voting.

Democrats, though, were not part of that agreement.

Johnson and Luna agreed to bring back a centuries-old tradition known as “vote pairing,” in which a lawmaker is essentially paired with another who withholds their vote, to cancel each other out.

Under the Johnson-Luna agreement, the absent lawmaker would still need to find another from the opposite party who is not voting. The pair also agreed to what is called “dead vote pairing,” meaning the agreement involves members who were already not voting, and therefore won’t impact the outcome of a vote.

But this “paired voting” procedure falls short of what Luna and Democrats initially sought: a way for expecting and new parents who are unable to travel to the US Capitol to actually cast their votes, especially given the House’s tight margins.

Speaking on the floor Tuesday, Pettersen argued the vote-pairing scheme won’t work on high-stakes votes, like the one this week on a budget blueprint that is a key step in advancing President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda. She would have needed a Republican lawmaker to be willing to vote present for her — essentially giving up their own vote on the GOP budget resolution.

“This is a fake and phony effort. Democrats won’t participate in this. We won’t be voting for the rule. … It’s disrespectful to the members who have put so much work into this,” Rep. Pete Aguilar of California told reporters Tuesday. “It’s unfortunate that Rep. Luna’s walking away from the bipartisanship that we’ve had in this effort.”

Separately, Luna said Tuesday that Johnson had “apologized” for suggesting the House could not vote on the SAVE Act, which targets noncitizen voting, because of the Florida Republican’s push for proxy voting for parents of newborns.

“The national messaging was completely wrong, and I will say that the speaker has apologized for going out and omitting information to the press, saying that we couldn’t have passed the SAVE Act last week. We could have,” she told CNN.

“And a lot of people are frustrated right now because they want Congress to codify the president’s agenda. So that’s exactly what you know we’re going to be hopefully doing this week,” she added.

She would not specify whether the speaker apologized to her privately or during Tuesday’s closed-door GOP conference meeting.

After his efforts to block remote voting failed earlier this month, Johnson halted all work in the House, claiming, “that rule being brought down means that we can’t have any further action on the floor this week.”

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