Rule Rejected in House – Luna’s Proxy Bill Saved

Today the House took up H Res 282, the rule for the consideration of this week’s legislation under ‘regular’ order. The measure was defeated by a vote of 206 to 222, with nine Republicans voting with the Democrats against the resolution. Unlike similar no votes last session, the Republicans voting no were not members of the Freedom Caucus, rather today these votes came from moderates.

The main purpose of the resolution was to provide the ‘rule’ for the consideration of three bills:

SJ Res 28 – A joint resolution disapproving the rule submitted by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection relating to "Defining Larger Participants of a Market for General-Use Digital Consumer Payment Applications",

HR 1526 – No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025, and

HR 22 - Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act

All three bills are part of the Trump agenda and have been expected to pass with mainly party line votes, with no objections known from any Republicans. Democrats were expected to vote against the HJ Res 282 as a matter of course.

What happened is that the Rules Committee, this morning, added a §5 to the resolution before it was approved in Committee. Section 5 was added to stop the House from considering H Res 23, the Proxy Voting for New Parents Resolution. This resolution was introduced by Rep Luna (R,FL) to modify the House Rules to allow for new parents to vote by proxy, with certain limitations. This bill has been opposed by the Republican leadership, mainly as a keeping-the-faith opposition to the proxy voting allowed by the Democrats during the Covid epidemic. Luna was able to get a majority of the House members to sign a discharge petition to force a vote on the floor.

With eleven Republicans willing to sign the discharge petition it was almost a foregone conclusion that H Res 23 is going to pass if it were to come to the floor. To prevent such ‘objectionable’ legislation from getting to the floor, §5 was added to the rule that would have made a special exception to the rules pertaining to discharge petitions specifically for H Res 23 or substantially similar language for the remainder of the session. The leadership was betting that the desire to support the Trump agenda items included in the rule would override the interest in voting for proxy voting rule.

With the votes on the covered bills at least temporarily stopped, there will be no more votes scheduled on the floor of the House this week. This still leaves the matter of the discharge petition unresolved.

Politico is reporting that Luna resigned from the Freedom Caucus over this issue.