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Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna say they’ve reached a deal to end the proxy voting dispute for new parents, clearing the way to reopen the House floor after nearly a week of gridlock.
House GOP leaders will formalize “vote pairing,” allowing an absent member—such as a new parent—to coordinate with a present lawmaker voting the opposite way to offset their absence. Some details of the vote pairing deal remain unclear, including how it will be enforced. While not equivalent to remote voting, vote pairing allows an absence to be offset, though the absent member’s vote isn’t officially recorded.
The practice, rarely used in Congress, was last seen in 2018 when Sen. Lisa Murkowski paired with Sen. Steve Daines during the Kavanaugh confirmation. Speaker Johnson detailed the vote pairing agreement during a GOP conference call Sunday. As a result, Rep. Luna will not move forward with her bipartisan discharge petition, which had 218 signatures, to allow remote voting for new parents.
We want to ask you, the reader: do you support the new proxy voting solution: “vote pairing”? Answer in our poll below and comment your thoughts on the compromise between Johnson and Luna.
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