Parental leave is hardly a cutting-edge subject in the year 2025.
The 20 largest employers in the United States have for years offered paid parental leave to at least some of their workers. During his 2018 State of the Union address, President Trump endorsed paid family leave as a way to support working families.
But Congress, which is exempt from labor and anti-discrimination laws, has long held itself apart from the way the rest of the country operates. And the failure this week of a bipartisan effort to update House rules to allow new parents to vote remotely after the birth of a child underscored how, with Republicans in control of both chambers, a 1950s mentality can still dominate the institution at times.
The fight over the measure also highlighted how much further to the right House Republicans are than much of mainstream culture in America.
A majority of the House — every Democrat and a dozen Republicans — supported changing the rules to bring the chamber into the 21st century by allowing new parents to take a 12-week leave during which they could designate a colleague to cast votes on their behalf. But in the end, the G.O.P. backing evaporated and the House voted to kill the measure on Tuesday, with all but one Republican in favor and all Democrats opposed.
It came after Speaker Mike Johnson went to extraordinary lengths to shut down the proposal, freezing the floor for a week in an effort to make sure it would never receive a vote.
It was a deflating end to a fight that the bipartisan group of young parents thought they were going to win. And it underscored the outsize power of far-right Republicans who hold some views that are deeply out of step with modern times.
“We are so far behind the times in the way that we do things here in Congress, in our inability to address the needs of families today,” Representative Brittany Pettersen, Democrat of Colorado, said in an interview on Tuesday. “The question is whether you think young parents should be in Congress and have a seat at the table, and it doesn’t seem like leadership does.”
Ms. Pettersen, who has been carting her newborn back and forth halfway across the country in order to continue working and voting, had been collaborating with Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, to spearhead the change to the rules.
After making an impassioned speech on the House floor last week in favor of the proxy voting proposal as she held her squawking and squirming baby in her arms, Ms. Pettersen said she received an outpouring of support from women across the country.
“They’ve been shocked,” she said. “They just had no idea that somebody in my position would not be able to vote and represent their constituents.”
Ms. Luna conceded on Tuesday that the fight she waged for over a year did not end as she wanted it to.
“The American people spoke,” she said. “They want younger members of Congress, and if you want younger members of Congress, you’re going to have to make changes.”
She said Mr. Johnson had privately apologized to her and other Republicans who had supported the measure for using strong-arm tactics to try to bury it without a vote and accusing its backers of stalling Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“He said that it was not his intention to try to mislead the public on that,” Ms. Luna said. “And so we appreciate his apology.”
Republicans have long opposed proxy voting on principle. They argue that it tears at the fabric of Congress, which is all about convening in person to debate and ultimately vote on legislation. They think it’s unconstitutional. And they believe that any tiny carve-out — even one as specific as a parental leave — would open the door to more.
But as debate over the proposal raged in recent days, it was clear that for at least some Republicans, the fight was just as much about whether a new mother belongs in Congress at all.
“If you aren’t capable of doing the job your constituents sent you to do, then you should step aside and let someone else do it,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, declared on social media.
The opposition to proxy voting was starkly at odds with broad public approval for what seemed to many like a common-sense measure that would not drastically change the institution. Paid Leave for All, a national campaign of organizations, released findings on Monday from a test it conducted that showed that hearing about Mr. Johnson’s move to block proxy voting increased support for the measure by up to 23 points.
But Mr. Johnson’s intransigence was in line with his views and the way Republicans have run the House in recent years. When Mr. Johnson won the gavel in 2023, some of his colleagues described him as someone whose positions on social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion were in line with the Republican Party of the 1990s — and the America of the 1950s.
(Mr. Johnson is opposed to same-sex marriage and no-fault divorce, and has referred to homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle” and called abortion a “holocaust.”)
But it’s not just him. Same-sex marriage, for example, is broadly popular across the country and across party lines. Mr. Trump has said the matter is “settled law,” but within the House Republican Conference, supporting it can be a career killer.
Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, ran into a wall of opposition when he ran for speaker in 2023 because he had supported same-sex marriage, a position that some evangelical Christian lawmakers said was disqualifying.
“You don’t need to get right with me, brother,” Representative Rick W. Allen, Republican of Georgia, told Mr. Emmer back then, when explaining that backing same-sex marriage was a red line for him. “You need to get right with God.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
