U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen has flown from Colorado to Washington, D.C., with her newborn son four times to cast votes and do her job in the nation’s capital.
But since 10-week-old Sam’s birth in January, she has also missed around 50 votes while staying home in Lakewood to care for him. That was all the more reason for Pettersen’s disappointment this week after a resolution she had co-authored — to give new parents in Congress the power to vote by proxy for 12 weeks as they care for their newborns — fizzled over the weekend.
“If you gave birth, it is a very intense few weeks in a recovery period, post birth,” Pettersen, a Democrat, said in a phone interview from Washington on Tuesday. “So this is not like you’re hanging out on vacation at home. These are very real medical circumstances that prevent you from being able to travel across the country to be there in person.”
Even though she was joined by Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, plus nearly a dozen other GOP members of Congress, the push for the proxy vote ran into strong resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The Republican speaker has vigorously opposed the effort, calling it an affront to the Constitution that would open “Pandora’s box.”
On Sunday, Luna, also a young mother, announced that she had reached a compromise with the speaker. Rather than allow proxy voting, the agreement would formalize a “pairing” system long used in Congress, in which one member who is physically present in the House cancels out the vote of someone who is absent.
Pettersen, 43, on Monday took to X to thank Luna for her efforts on the issue but wrote that “this outcome does not address the barriers we’ve fought so hard to overcome.”
In her interview with The Post, she said that in the face of Johnson’s resistance, the push for a proxy vote “became insurmountable.”
“It makes no sense that in the 21st century, we are unable to accommodate for a vote being counted — just because we aren’t physically present when we’re unable to do so,” she said. “We’re so far behind the times in Congress (with) the way that we do things, you know, the focus and priorities. And that’s because we need to change the faces and voices and life experiences represented here — and I’m hopeful that we have young parents who have joined together to try to shake things up.”
Proxy voting had been put into effect under a Democratic-controlled Congress for around two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it didn’t last.
Last week, Johnson endured a decisive defeat after he staged an aggressive effort to squash the Luna-Pettersen proposal. Nine of his own Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting his plan.
And just days after that vote, Pettersen’s resolution appeared to get an additional shot of life when President Donald Trump expressed support for it. Though the Republican president said he would defer to Johnson on the operations of the House, he also said: “I don’t know why it’s controversial.”
Pettersen said she was “very surprised” by the president’s position on the issue.
“You know, this is something that we agree on,” she said over the phone as Sam could be heard cooing in the background. “But this shouldn’t be controversial, and the rest of America agrees on that.”
As for the future of proxy voting for new parents in Congress, Pettersen said she was ready to continue to do battle. She said she wanted to start by forming a bipartisan parents caucus “so that we can have power in numbers when it comes to the schedule.”
“Obviously, we faced some setbacks, but the fight is far from over — and I know that we’re going to continue to work to get this done,” Pettersen said. “This issue is not going away.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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