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.

Congressional Republicans are mulling the sale of some public lands to help pay for a massive bill to enact President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, according to lawmakers aware of the discussions.

House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman said one concept under review would involve selling some lands around Western cities or national parks to build more housing.

“It would just be in areas where you can’t get affordable housing, like for gateway communities,” said Westerman in an interview, “so you could actually have people to work in the national parks, maybe around some big metropolitan areas in the West.”

It’s still far from guaranteed this will make it into a final package, however, with more than one GOP lawmaker saying it would be a nonstarter.

Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines has already made his objections known to leaders, said an aide in a text message: “Senator Daines has never and will never support the sale of public lands.”

Another Montana Republican, Rep. Ryan Zinke — who served as Interior secretary in Trump’s first term — said he has also told House leadership public land sales are a red line for him.

“I have made clear: There are some things I won’t do,” he said. “I will never bend on the Constitution, and I won’t bend on selling our public lands.”

Democrats are also due to create a political headache for Republicans if the GOP pursues such proposals.

“If they succeed, Donald Trump and Elon Musk will sell off your right to access the places you know and love: The place you first learned to fish or harvested your first elk,” Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said in a statement. “The campground your family goes to on long weekends. The trail you hike to clear your head. The site that was sacred to your ancestors and is now sacred to you.”

Republicans are talking about this idea at a time when lawmakers are scrambling to find big savings and revenue generators for the party-line bill they want to pass through reconciliation in the coming months.

Speaker Mike Johnson is digging in against allowing proxy voting for the House’s new parents, heightening a standoff with members of his own party that has frozen legislative action in the chamber.

“While I understand the pure motivations of the few Republican proxy vote advocates, I simply cannot support the change they seek,” Johnson said in a Wednesday post on X.

The speaker is in a serious bind after suffering a stunning defeat over a procedural vote Tuesday, prompting him to send the House home until next Monday. Johnson’s initial effort to block a vote on a proxy-voting measure from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) failed after eight fellow Republicans joined her and every Democrat.

Luna was on the cusp of forcing a vote on her bill under a discharge petition, which can circumvent leadership’s control of the floor.

If Johnson attempts a similar move next week, Luna and several of her GOP allies insist they will vote against any effort to reopen the floor. The speaker’s leadership circle, meanwhile, says if he doesn’t try to kill Luna’s petition, House Freedom Caucus hard-liners who oppose proxy voting will themselves defeat any attempt to get House business moving as usual.

Johnson’s circle is aware of the optics of opposing accommodations for new mothers while also upholding their pro-life values and not risking electoral blowback ahead of the midterms.

“As the father of a large family, I know firsthand the difficulty and countless sacrifices that come with balancing family life and service in Congress,” Johnson wrote Wednesday. “New mothers and all young parents face real challenges in this regard. We truly empathize with them.”

But he said he had an obligation to “defend and uphold the Constitution and the integrity of this institution, which has stood the test of time for more than two centuries.”