Politics
In Congress, a Push for Proxy Voting for New Parents Draws Bipartisan Support
Representative Brittany Pettersen, a second-term Colorado Democrat, was not planning to have a second child at the age of 43.
“As if our life wasn’t complicated enough!” she said with a laugh as she arranged herself on a couch in her office on Capitol Hill earlier this week, staring down at her pregnant belly just weeks from her due date. She blamed the “mistake” on the confusion of working in two time zones. “It can make things hard with consistent birth control,” she said. “It was not part of the plan.”
Congress has existed for 236 years, but somehow Ms. Pettersen is about to become only the 13th voting member to give birth while in office, and the first from her home state. As Ms. Pettersen tries to plan the next phase of her life, the reality is setting in that this job was not created with someone like her in mind.
There is no maternity leave for members of Congress. While they can take time away from the office without sacrificing their pay, they cannot vote if they are not present at the Capitol. So Ms. Pettersen has taken a lead role in a new push by a bipartisan group of younger lawmakers and new parents in Congress to change the rules to allow them to vote remotely while they take up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
“This job is not made for young women, for working families, and it’s definitely not made for regular people,” said Ms. Pettersen. “It’s historically been wealthy individuals who are not of childbearing age who do this work.”
Before boarding her plane on Thursday to return to Lakewood, Colo., where she planned to remain until after she gives birth, Ms. Pettersen introduced the “Proxy Voting for New Parents Resolution.” It would change House rules to allow new mothers and fathers in Congress to stay away from Washington immediately after the birth of a child and designate a colleague to cast votes on their behalf.
“I feel really torn,” Ms. Pettersen said, “because I’m going to choose to be home to make sure that my newborn is taken care of, but I feel that it’s unfair that I’m unable to have my constituents represented at that time.”
The resolution, she said, “is common sense. It’s about modernizing Congress.”
The idea has been percolating on Capitol Hill for some time, but has become all the more pressing for the new Congress, its proponents argue, because the House is now so closely divided, with Republicans holding the majority by just one vote.
Republicans savaged former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for breaking with centuries of history and House rules by instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Former Representative Kevin McCarthy, as the minority leader, filed a lawsuit arguing that allowing a member of Congress to deputize a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf when they were not present was unconstitutional.
House Republicans also argued that allowing proxy voting would have a negative effect on member “collegiality.” Ms. Luna’s resolution never came to the floor for a vote.
Now, the bipartisan group is trying again. Ms. Pettersen’s resolution was one of the first introduced in the opening days of the 119th Congress. It is slightly broader than Ms. Luna’s original proposal, written to include proxy voting for new fathers.
“I’m not in favor of proxy voting; I think it should be very rare,” said Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who welcomed his second child eight days before the election. “But I don’t think any member should be precluded from doing the job they were elected to do simply because they become a parent.”
Mr. Lawler, a leader of the new effort whose baby is 2 months old, cannot afford to be away from the Capitol while his party holds a one-seat majority.
“I understand the impact when you are given a choice between being home or coming and doing your job,” he said. “It’s not a great choice.”
Mr. Lawler dismissed concerns from House leaders about creating a bad precedent, saying the existing protocols no longer fit the Congress of the modern era.
“You have younger people getting elected to public office at a much higher rate than when these rules were established,” he said. “If we talk about being pro-family, you have to at least recognize that giving birth to a child or becoming a parent should not be an impediment to doing your job.”
Ms. Pettersen said she had considered having her baby in Washington so she could continue voting, but ultimately decided against it.
“It’s unfair to my family and unfair to my newborn if we’re not at home where all of our support and my doctor and support system is,” she said.
Ms. Pettersen is still relatively new to Washington and to motherhood — her son is still in prekindergarten — but the disconnect between her situation and the job of an elected official has been painfully obvious to her ever since she was pregnant with her first child and serving in the Colorado legislature.
Back then, she was the first member of that body ever to go on maternity leave. The only way to get paid while on leave was to categorize her situation as a “chronic illness.”
When she returned, Ms. Petterson successfully pressed to change the law to ensure that future state lawmakers would be given up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
Even before she walked the halls of Congress as the rare pregnant member, Ms. Pettersen said she felt like an odd fit for the Capitol.
When she was 6 years old, her mother was prescribed opioids after hurting her back and became addicted to heroine and then fentanyl. She overdosed more than 20 times. Growing up, Ms. Pettersen said, nobody even kept track of whether or not she came home at night.
“I saw Phish shows when I was 12 years old in Kansas and other places,” she said. “Still got straight A’s, though.”
(Her mother recently celebrated her 70th birthday and seven years in recovery.)
Because her parents were behind on taxes, she didn’t qualify for student loans, so Ms. Pettersen paid her way through school in cash, waiting tables, cleaning houses and working various odd jobs. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school or college.
Beating the odds has made Ms. Pettersen even more determined to try to change her current workplace to make it feasible for more people like her.
“Being pregnant and being a member of Congress, people ask, ‘How are you doing this with your family?’ — all these questions I know my male colleagues don’t get,” she said. “It’s such a double standard.”
President Trump has suggested attacks against Tesla are a coordinated effort to intimidate the billionaire Elon Musk, but an internal intelligence assessment did not support that claim and warned against conflating legal protests against Mr. Musk with vandalism to his property.
The attacks on Tesla vehicles and facilities “appear to have been conducted by lone offenders, and all known incidents occurred at night, making identification and arrest of the actors difficult,” officials with the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security wrote in an intelligence bulletin dated March 21 and obtained by The New York Times.
The initial assessment, shared with law enforcement agencies across the country and subject to change as investigations proceed, was based on an analysis of vandalism investigations in nine states over the past two months. It concluded that the attacks, which included firing gunshots, spraying graffiti, smashing windows and setting vehicles on fire, were “rudimentary” and not intended to injure people.
The people taking these actions “may perceive these attacks as victimless property crimes,” but their “tactics can cause accidental or intentional bodily harm” to bystanders and first responders, the officials wrote in the report.
While law enforcement agencies should aggressively pursue people committing those acts, they should not investigate “constitutionally protected activity” directed at Mr. Musk, who has overseen a far-reaching effort to reduce the size and function of the federal government, they added.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi described the Tesla attacks as “domestic terrorism.” The director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel, reiterated that assessment on Monday, saying it was investigating what he described as an increase in violent activity.
The bulletin did not explicitly identify the vandalism as “domestic violent extremism,” the term the government uses to describe domestic terrorism, although it cited political motives for the attacks. Its only mention of domestic violent extremism was an assessment of the difficulty in determining extremists’ “intent to commit violence.”
Mr. Trump suggested last week the vandalism was paid for “by people very highly political on the left,” without providing evidence.
A few days later, Ms. Bondi said she would prosecute “those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes,” echoing Mr. Trump’s claim.
A spokesman for Ms. Bondi said in a text message that the report “could not possibly include all the current information” given that the investigation was continuing, adding that leaks to the news media could “jeopardize serious terrorism investigations.”
Ms. Bondi has often praised and defended Mr. Musk, whom she has described as one of her close friends. On Sunday, Ms. Bondi suggested she might investigate Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, for telling attendees at an online anti-Musk rally that the world’s richest man needed to be “taken down” — even though Ms. Crockett said she was calling for political action, not violence.
“She is an elected public official, so she needs to tread very carefully because nothing will happen to Elon Musk, and we’re going to fight to protect all of the Tesla owners throughout this country,” Ms. Bondi said of Ms. Crockett during an appearance on Fox.
Mr. Patel echoed Mr. Trump and his allies in denouncing the vandalism.
“This is domestic terrorism,” he wrote on X. “Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.”
The attacks on Tesla facilities have intensified as opposition to Mr. Musk has grown.
Police arrested a 26-year-old woman a week ago for spraypainting anti-Musk messages on the front windows of a Tesla facility in Buffalo Grove, Ill. That same day, vandals broke windows and defaced a dealership in the San Diego area with swastikas and slogans.
Later in the week, unknown attackers fired more than a dozen shots at a Tesla dealership in Tigard, Ore., damaging some of the vehicles and store windows, followed by the firebombing of several Cybertrucks at a Tesla facility in Kansas City.
On Monday, several unexploded incendiary devices were found at a Tesla dealership in Austin that has been the site of anti-Musk protests. They were removed without incident.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is facing calls for his replacement after his controversial decision to help advance President Donald Trump’s recent stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, but not all Democrats are prepared to push him out just yet, giving him some time to prove himself.
For some in the party, Schumer is ruling on borrowed time.
“Something’s [got to] give,” former Democrat pollster Adam Carlson told Fox News Digital. “And while I would expect him to want to hold onto his leadership, I suspect the outright calls and whispers from his colleagues for him to be replaced as minority leader are real.”
“It’s a matter of when, not if,” he claimed.
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Chuck Schumer’s future as Democrat leader in the Senate is anything but certain after a crucial vote that led to backlash. (Reuters)
The influence he has lost among his own caucus is evident “by dozens of Senate Dems, including those in Trump-won states, coming out against the CR (continuing resolution) even after Schumer came out in favor of it,” Carlson said.
After Schumer’s vote this month, and the verbal shellacking and protests that followed, he told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “Look, I’m not stepping down.”
Following his vote, protests emerged outside his home and offices in Washington and New York, and he began to face calls for his ousting as leader and threats of primary challenges down the road.
“You know, sometimes when you’re a leader, you have to do things to avoid a real danger that might come down the curve,” Schumer further told “Meet the Press.”
The Democrat also pushed back on suggestions that his situation has parallels with that of former President Joe Biden, who was pressured to end his presidential campaign with just months until the election last year.
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But for the Democrat strategists looking at his circumstances, the similarities are clear.
Co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) Adam Green told Fox News Digital, “I don’t think his recent caving was a June debate moment for Chuck Schumer, but it was a fall-off-the-bike moment,” making explicit comparisons to Biden’s biking accident and his disastrous presidential debate performance that preceded his campaign suspension.
“And if he continues to stumble … instead of meeting this moment, there will be continued questions about his future leadership,” he said.
President Joe Biden falls to the ground during a bike ride in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on June 18, 2022. (Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz)
“I think it’s an uphill fight for him,” Green explained.
The PCCC leader compared Schumer to Biden once more, noting that the former president also had a prime and “eventually that prime was over.”
Carlson said “Schumer was an effective majority leader” for many years, “but being an opposition leader is an entirely different skill set” and could be one that the Democrat leader doesn’t have.
Some Democrat strategists speculated about potential replacements for the Senate minority leader if it comes to that, proposing Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., specifically.
“Chris Murphy has been turning a lot of heads,” Green said.
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Sen. Chris Murphy has emerged as one to watch. (Getty Images)
Representatives for Murphy, Schatz and Klobuchar did not provide comment in time for publication.
Other Democrat strategists don’t think Schumer should be replaced and are confident he won’t be.
Schumer “will survive this,” Democrat strategist Max Burns told Fox News Digital. He credited Trump’s “habit of flooding the zone” with Schumer’s ability to hang on.
Jim Kessler, former senior aide to Schumer and executive vice president for policy at Third Way, told Fox News Digital he expects him “to remain as the Democratic leader in the Senate.”
“Yes, there is a vocal group of House Democrats and activists calling for him to step aside as leader,” he said. But, “There is almost no one in the Senate doing so and most Democrats in Washington are simply keeping their heads down.”
“I talked to one House Democrat who said he was livid for 24 hours and then thankful after he thought about it for a few days,” Kessler said.
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Schumer said he won’t step down. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Jim Manley, former senior communications advisor and spokesperson for former Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Senate Democratic Caucus, agreed that Schumer does not need to step down.
“There is plenty of blame to go around” that isn’t confined to Schumer, Manley said.
Another Democrat strategist, who opted to remain anonymous, said “we’re in this position where no one has stepped up to be sort of the primary protagonist to Trump as the antagonist,” pointing to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as someone who skillfully played this role in his first administration.
The strategist further hammered Democrats for being too quick to dispose of leaders and party members who make mistakes or disagree, labeling the calls for Schumer to step down “premature.”
Schumer’s office did not provide comment to Fox News Digital in time for publication.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court on Monday to block a judge’s order requiring the government to “immediately” rehire 16,000 federal employees.
In an emergency appeal, they argued that U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco had no legal authority to second-guess the administration’s personnel decisions.
The appeal is the first asking the high court to weigh in on the administration’s aggressive plan to shrink the federal workforce.
Acting Solicitor Gen. Sarah Harris said the judge’s “extraordinary reinstatement order violates the separation of powers, arrogating to a single district court the Executive Branch’s powers of personnel management on the flimsiest of grounds and the hastiest of timelines. That is no way to run a government.”
She said the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had yet to rule on the administration’s appeal of the judge’s order, and asked the high court to put the judge’s order on hold, at least temporarily.
While federal employees have legal rights as civil servants, those rights have proved to be largely ineffective in fighting the large-scale layoffs.
Unions representing tens of thousands of federal employees sued in late January, but their suits were tossed out on the grounds that the civil service law requires employees to lodge their complaints with an administrative agency inside the government.
The Supreme Court has said this is the exclusive route for such claims.
As a fallback option, Alsup, an appointee of President Clinton, cited claims from people who rely on the National Park Service or on the Veteran Affairs, Defense, Energy, Agriculture, Interior and Treasury departments.
Speaking in his courtroom, he ordered those agencies to “offer reinstatement to any and all probationary employees terminated on or about February 13th and 14th 2025.”
Harris did not describe what the administration has done to comply with the order.
She said the Supreme Court “should not allow a single district court to … seize control over reviewing federal personnel decisions.”
The justices are likely to ask for a response from the lawyers who filed suit in San Francisco.
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