Congress

House proxy-voting mess threatens to jam up the GOP agenda

Published

2 years ago

April 3, 2025

Speaker Mike Johnson has grand ambitions to finalize a budget plan next week and launch Republicans on a final sprint toward passing their “big, beautiful” domestic policy bill. One problem: He doesn’t appear to have control of the House floor.

An internal GOP fight over whether new parents serving in the House should be able to cast votes by proxy has metastasized into a battle of wills between competing factions of Republicans. The showdown culminated in a stunning vote Tuesday where nine Republicans joined with Democrats to reject Johnson’s move to block the proxy-voting proposal.

Johnson responded by sending lawmakers home for the week, skipping planned votes on election integrity, judicial overreach and other key GOP priorities. Now he is scrambling to find an off-ramp as he pledges to finish work next week on a fiscal blueprint for their sprawling party-line agenda.

Publicly, he doubled down Wednesday on his opposition to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s proxy-voting effort. The Florida Republican recruited several GOP colleagues to sign a discharge petition, successfully circumventing Johnson to force a floor vote.

Behind the scenes, however, he has been in frequent contact with Luna negotiating other potential legislative options in an attempt to unjam the House floor, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

Johnson said Wednesday he was “actively working on every possible accommodation to make Congressional service simpler for young mothers.” By evening, he suggested a breakthrough was close.

“I think there may be a path through this,” Johnson told reporters. “We’re trying to work through and resolve it in a way that satisfies everybody. So I think we can do that.”

At stake is not only Johnson’s control of the House floor, but also the GOP’s tight timeline for advancing their closely watched megabill. Senate Republicans on Wednesday released a revised budget blueprint — a key intermediate step — and planned to work into the weekend to approve it. Johnson reiterated in a separate interview he wants the House to give it final approval next week.

But first he needs to find a way to accommodate both Luna and her group of GOP allies, who have so far been intent on pushing through their proxy-voting proposal, and a similarly strong-willed group of Republican hard-liners, who have threatened to hold up House business themselves if Luna’s proposal isn’t sent to the dustbin.

So far Luna has not indicated she is willing to budge on her demand for a vote on her bill. She holds a trump card: With the discharge petition now complete and ripe for consideration, she could potentially call the measure up as soon as the House comes back into session. And if Johnson makes another attempt to stifle the vote, Luna and several of her GOP allies insist they will again join with Democrats and reject it.

They include a geographically and ideologically diverse group of GOP members who mostly aren’t known as rebels, including Reps. Kevin Kiley of California, Mike Lawler of New York, Max Miller of Ohio and Greg Steube of Florida.

Johnson’s tough stand against allowing new parents to vote by proxy might seem puzzling to House outsiders — and it’s puzzling to many inside the House, too. But it is at least partly rooted in the venomous partisanship that developed between the two parties during the Covid pandemic.

Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted widespread proxy voting less than three months into the national emergency over the objections of the Republican minority, which sued unsuccessfully to stop it. It stayed in place for nearly three years, until the GOP regained the majority and undid it in 2023.

Johnson alluded to those hard feelings in a statement he posted to social media Wednesday: “Nancy Pelosi experimented with proxy voting during the 117th Congress, and it was quickly abused,” he wrote, adding that he had “responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution and the integrity of this institution” and “cannot allow it again.”

Pelosi responded to Johnson, noting that the Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit brought by GOP leaders challenging the practice and that Johnson himself voted by proxy 39 times. “It’s just another shameful case of Republicans’ ‘rules for thee, not for me,’” she wrote on X.

Johnson also has political reasons to oppose proxy voting: If he doesn’t try to kill Luna’s petition, according to his fellow GOP leaders, House Freedom Caucus hard-liners who fiercely oppose proxy voting will themselves defeat any attempt to get House business moving as usual.

The Catch-22 Johnson now finds himself in is especially notable given that he has racked up a series of narrow and significant wins this year after struggling to wrangle the House during his first year as speaker. That success has largely been due to Trump, who has helped strong-arm votes on key budget and spending measures.

Trump has not expressed any opinion on the proxy-voting fight, and he has long enjoyed close ties with Luna. But some House leaders are openly warning Luna and the eight Republicans who voted alongside her Tuesday to stand down.

“I wouldn’t want to be one of the nine people that stand in front of the Trump agenda,” said Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan, the No. 4 House Republican, who didn’t rule out potential presidential intervention in a brief interview Wednesday.

“I’d rather be able to clean up our own house and deal with it internally and not have the president weigh in,” she added. “But the president is pretty focused on his agenda, and if he needs to weigh in, I think he will.”

Speaking on NewsNation Wednesday night, Luna said she had spoken to Trump. “The president assured that this would get resolved,” she said.

Congress

Clean energy group sets its sights on a new GOP target: Lauren Boebert

Published

9 hours ago

October 7, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A clean energy group is launching a $1.5 million spend against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), its latest effort this midterm cycle targeting Republicans who actively work against renewables.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition’s first ad in the spend, which was obtained by Blue Light News, focuses on an embarrassing incident for Boebert: when she was ejected from a live musical performance of “Beetlejuice” for allegedly vaping, singing and recording the show.

“If Lauren Boebert can’t be trusted in a room full of kids, then she can’t be trusted in the halls of Congress,” the ad says.

The spot makes no mention of clean energy or Boebert’s attacks on the so-called “Green New Scam.” The strategy mimics the group’s previous playbook that it has deployed to help defeat Reps. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) in their Republican primaries earlier this year, as the latter two sought statewide office. The PAC had tried to paint Ogles as an absentee member of Congress and Roy as insufficiently MAGA.

The group, which is backed by solar executives, has become an increasingly forceful player this cycle, which has seen a massive influx of outside spending.

“This industry has been villainized and used as a punching bag at times by the right, and the industry hasn’t always punched back,” said Chris Coffey, the CEO of Tusk Strategies, which is helping run the group. “Maybe when they’re deciding who to villainize next year, they will at least be like, ‘You know what? I don’t need problems with those guys.’”

Boebert’s district is historically deeply red. But Invest in Tomorrow also commissioned a poll, which shows she is underwater: 39% of likely voters view her favorably and 55% view her unfavorably. It also found Boebert leading the district’s Democratic nominee Eileen Laubacher by 5 points.

The poll, conducted by Impact Research from Sept. 21 to 24, polled 403 likely voters and had a margin of error of ±4.8%.

Congress

Trahan unveils AI liability discussion draft

Published

17 hours ago

October 7, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Lori Trahan on Wednesday unveiled a discussion draft for a bill that would make artificial intelligence developers liable when their products cause harm.

The legislation comes after OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and autonomously hacked into AI platform Hugging Face and accessed U.S. government websites.

The Clear Liability for Artificial Intelligence Misconduct Act aims to make it easier for those harmed by so-called rogue AI to bring claims against developers. Trahan’s bill does not preempt new state laws on AI liability — historically a prerequisite for attracting Republican support in the House.

“When someone breaks the law and hurts you, you can take them to court. That shouldn’t change just because the wrongdoer is an AI agent,” Trahan (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “Developers have already built systems capable of acting on their own and causing real damage. The CLAIM Act makes sure they answer for what their systems do.”

Legal experts have warned that existing laws require proof of intent or negligence, standards that can be difficult to show in court when AI models go rogue.

Trahan’s bill would ensure AI developers are unable to argue that their AI systems are incapable of intent. Instead, courts “would presume an AI system acted with the state of mind a person taking the same actions would have had.”

Trahan spokesperson Francis Grubar said work on the CLAIM Act began almost immediately after theJuly introduction of the FRONTIER Act, legislation with Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) that would grant the government power to restrict the deployment of AI models deemed to pose catastrophic risks. While that bill aims to prevent serious harms before they happen, Grubar said the CLAIM Act would address how to impose accountability for existing damages.

Unlike an AI liability proposal announced last week by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Trahan’s legislation would not amend the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Grubar said the CLAIM Act would instead impose clearer liability on a broader range of harms, as well as autonomous or AI-enabled cyberattacks.

The CFFA, an anti-hacking law that bars individuals from accessing a computer without consent, requires proof of intent to hack into a computer system, which can’t be as easily applied to AI agents.

The Hugging Face incident, along with a flurry of other disclosed hacking incidents by rogue AI agents from OpenAI and other AI developers, has sparked a debate over how companies should be held legally liable for their AI systems.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Blue Light News’s Decoded podcast, said there should be a new “liability framework” to hold developers accountable for AI-powered cyberattacks. His comments come after White House officials like Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, who was recently appointed as AI czar by President Donald Trump, previously said that existing product liability laws are sufficient for now in addressing AI’s risks.

Congress

Vance to sit for CBS town hall in Michigan ahead of midterms

Published

17 hours ago

October 7, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Vice President JD Vance will take questions from Michigan voters in a CBS News town hall airing Oct. 17 as the Trump administration prepares a closing message to voters ahead of the midterms.

The town hall comes amid a blitz of campaign events for Vance and President Donald Trump as their party faces multiple headwinds that could cost them control of the House and Senate.

Michigan’s Senate contest between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers has become one of the cycle’s closely watched battleground contests. Michigan also has several competitive House races and will elect a new governor for the first time in eight years.

Vance campaigned in Michigan with Rogers, gubernatorial nominee John James and Mike Bouchard Jr., the GOP nominee in the 10th Congressional District, at an Aug. 31 rally in Sterling Heights. Rep. Lisa McClain also appeared at the event.

The one-hour special, moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil, will be recorded earlier in the week. Vance and Dokoupil will discuss issues facing voters, including affordability, tariffs, immigration, health care, artificial intelligence, the war with Iran and the state of American democracy, according to CBS News.

The two were scheduled for a town hall interview in March, but the vice president postponed due to the war with Iran.

The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.