Speaker Mike Johnson has grand ambitions to finalize a budget plan next week and launch Republicans on a final sprint toward passing their “big, beautiful” domestic policy bill. One problem: He doesn’t appear to have control of the House floor.
An internal GOP fight over whether new parents serving in the House should be able to cast votes by proxy has metastasized into a battle of wills between competing factions of Republicans. The showdown culminated in a stunning vote Tuesday where nine Republicans joined with Democrats to reject Johnson’s move to block the proxy-voting proposal.
Johnson responded by sending lawmakers home for the week, skipping planned votes on election integrity, judicial overreach and other key GOP priorities. Now he is scrambling to find an off-ramp as he pledges to finish work next week on a fiscal blueprint for their sprawling party-line agenda.
Publicly, he doubled down Wednesday on his opposition to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s proxy-voting effort. The Florida Republican recruited several GOP colleagues to sign a discharge petition, successfully circumventing Johnson to force a floor vote.
Behind the scenes, however, he has been in frequent contact with Luna negotiating other potential legislative options in an attempt to unjam the House floor, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
Johnson said Wednesday he was “actively working on every possible accommodation to make Congressional service simpler for young mothers.” By evening, he suggested a breakthrough was close.
“I think there may be a path through this,” Johnson told reporters. “We’re trying to work through and resolve it in a way that satisfies everybody. So I think we can do that.”
At stake is not only Johnson’s control of the House floor, but also the GOP’s tight timeline for advancing their closely watched megabill. Senate Republicans on Wednesday released a revised budget blueprint — a key intermediate step — and planned to work into the weekend to approve it. Johnson reiterated in a separate interview he wants the House to give it final approval next week.
But first he needs to find a way to accommodate both Luna and her group of GOP allies, who have so far been intent on pushing through their proxy-voting proposal, and a similarly strong-willed group of Republican hard-liners, who have threatened to hold up House business themselves if Luna’s proposal isn’t sent to the dustbin.
So far Luna has not indicated she is willing to budge on her demand for a vote on her bill. She holds a trump card: With the discharge petition now complete and ripe for consideration, she could potentially call the measure up as soon as the House comes back into session. And if Johnson makes another attempt to stifle the vote, Luna and several of her GOP allies insist they will again join with Democrats and reject it.
They include a geographically and ideologically diverse group of GOP members who mostly aren’t known as rebels, including Reps. Kevin Kiley of California, Mike Lawler of New York, Max Miller of Ohio and Greg Steube of Florida.
Johnson’s tough stand against allowing new parents to vote by proxy might seem puzzling to House outsiders — and it’s puzzling to many inside the House, too. But it is at least partly rooted in the venomous partisanship that developed between the two parties during the Covid pandemic.
Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted widespread proxy voting less than three months into the national emergency over the objections of the Republican minority, which sued unsuccessfully to stop it. It stayed in place for nearly three years, until the GOP regained the majority and undid it in 2023.
Johnson alluded to those hard feelings in a statement he posted to social media Wednesday: “Nancy Pelosi experimented with proxy voting during the 117th Congress, and it was quickly abused,” he wrote, adding that he had “responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution and the integrity of this institution” and “cannot allow it again.”
Pelosi responded to Johnson, noting that the Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit brought by GOP leaders challenging the practice and that Johnson himself voted by proxy 39 times. “It’s just another shameful case of Republicans’ ‘rules for thee, not for me,’” she wrote on X.
Johnson also has political reasons to oppose proxy voting: If he doesn’t try to kill Luna’s petition, according to his fellow GOP leaders, House Freedom Caucus hard-liners who fiercely oppose proxy voting will themselves defeat any attempt to get House business moving as usual.
The Catch-22 Johnson now finds himself in is especially notable given that he has racked up a series of narrow and significant wins this year after struggling to wrangle the House during his first year as speaker. That success has largely been due to Trump, who has helped strong-arm votes on key budget and spending measures.
Trump has not expressed any opinion on the proxy-voting fight, and he has long enjoyed close ties with Luna. But some House leaders are openly warning Luna and the eight Republicans who voted alongside her Tuesday to stand down.
“I wouldn’t want to be one of the nine people that stand in front of the Trump agenda,” said Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, the No. 4 House Republican, who didn’t rule out potential presidential intervention in a brief interview Wednesday.
“I’d rather be able to clean up our own house and deal with it internally and not have the president weigh in,” she added. “But the president is pretty focused on his agenda, and if he needs to weigh in, I think he will.”
Speaking on NewsNation Wednesday night, Luna said she had spoken to Trump. “The president assured that this would get resolved,” she said.