Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., once famously said that, to understand his "worldview," all one needs to do is "pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it." A few months into Donald Trump's second term, however, Johnson has displayed a lot of tolerance for injustices that would outrage the Jesus of the Bible: redentioning innocent men to a torture prison in El Salvador, falsely accusing grandparents of being "frauds" as a pretext to take away their Social Security checks, and condemning children to die of preventable diseases like HIV and measles. None of this has perturbed Johnson, who backed Trump throughout the spiraling sadism of the administration.
This week, however, Johnson found one policy he cannot abide by: allowing representatives to serve their constituents while simultaneously caring for their newborn infants. On Tuesday, Johnson attempted to block a bipartisan bill to permit House members to vote by proxy, aided by technology, when on parental leave. Even though the speaker has extensive control over what bills come up for a vote, he couldn't stop this one. Nine Republicans crossed the aisle to help Democrats meet the threshold to force the bill onto the floor. After it passed, Johnson was so irate he canceled all congressional activity for the week and sent members home.
"Given the chance to actually support families, they turn their backs," Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said of the Republicans who backed Johnson's maneuver. Much of the response from the left echoed this rhetoric, pointing out that Republicans claim to be a "pro-family" party, but when given a chance to make life slightly easier for new parents, Johnson and his caucus refuse. As many critics pointed out, Johnson himself voted by proxy multiple times during the pandemic, but somehow has decided it's "unconstitutional" to give the same right to people who have parenting duties that physically pull them away from Congress.
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But it's not quite right to attribute this to hypocrisy. Johnson's behavior is perfectly consistent with the renewed Republican enthusiasm for pushing women out of public life and back into the kitchen. As David Graham at the Atlantic wrote in a recent article on how Republicans are implementing Project 2025, the party under Trump has made the "effort to restore traditional families" a priority. "In this vision, men are breadwinners and women are mothers," he writes, pointing out how the Project 2025 blueprint spells out different policy ideas to force women out of the workplace and into roles as stay-at-home wives.
"When I was pregnant, I couldn’t fly towards the end of my due date because it was unsafe," Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., said during debate over the proxy vote policy. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., a new mother who led the anemic Republican support for parental leave, declared that it demonstrated "the importance of female members having a vote in Washington, D.C."
Johnson himself voted by proxy multiple times during the pandemic, but somehow has decided it's "unconstitutional" to give the same right to people who have parenting duties that physically pull them away from Congress.
Of course, the reason most Republicans oppose the policy is because they don't value women's voices in politics. Especially for the religious right, which most Republicans are aligned with, the goal is getting women out of the dirty business of politics, so they can focus their energies on tending home and hearth. From that vantage point, there is no reason to create accommodations for parents of young children in Congress. Mothers are expected to stay at home and not work. Fathers are expected to come to work, no matter what is going on at home, as domestic labor is left to women. One of the few Republicans to back the bill, Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, tried to plead that fathers are sometimes needed at home, telling Johnson he regrets leaving a sick son behind in the hospital so he could return to Congress to vote. But in the increasingly rigid gender politics of the MAGA-fied GOP, even tending a sick child is seen as women's work that men should not be bothered with.
This is a piece of a larger Republican Party revolt against the work-from-home culture that rose during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of Trump's first actions when he returned to the White House was to issue an executive order forcing federal workers to cease remote work and show up at the office, whether their jobs required it or not. He justified this by falsely accusing remote workers of "not working" but "playing tennis" or "playing golf." Part of this is his usual psychological projection, as Trump spends an inordinate amount of his work week on the golf course. Part of it was the Project 2025 and Elon Musk's agenda of making the job so miserable that people quit. But Johnson's tantrum is a reminder that another central Republican concern is that work-from-home policies might help women's equality.
During the height of the pandemic, there was reason to fear that work-from-home was hurting women more than helping. The burden of childcare and domestic labor fell disproportionately on women, especially with married couples where both spouses were trying to work from home to avoid the virus. But much of that was due to the inability to get kids into school or day care. Now the ability to work remotely, at least some of the time, seems to help women out. It's not just because it allows women flexibility to handle domestic chores, which still fall mostly on their shoulders. Additionally, with more men working remotely, it could slowly build a culture where men pick up more domestic labor. If a wife has to be in the office that day, but her husband doesn't, it makes sense for him to fetch the kids from school or make dinner. That's exactly the future Republicans are trying to prevent with the relentless insistence that a physical presence is needed in the office for work to "count."
Luna's leadership on the proxy voting bill underscores how this ideological pressure is increasingly a paradox for female Republican politicians. It's one that Republican women have often tried to minimize by leaning into a "tradwife" aesthetic, hoping that a submissive voice and affect could distract from their ambition. The nation saw this most clearly during the uncanny State of the Union response speech from Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala, last year. Britt spoke in what's mockingly called the "fundie baby voice" and sat in her kitchen, trying hard to look like a submissive wife. The act didn't work, collapsing under the contradictions that arise from playing housewife while auditioning to be Trump's running mate. She's sitting in a safe seat in the Senate, but Britt likely has to kiss goodbye her hopes of climbing the power ladder even higher.
As I wrote about in February, GOP leadership has set its sights in recent months on disempowering conservative-coded women, especially. The state-level laws restricting reproductive rights disproportionately affect Republican-voting women. Proposals to restrict voting rights would disenfranchise married women more than single women, which would again do more harm to Republican women. And there's been a big push to take female leaders down a peg, with MAGA influencers now openly saying women shouldn't be in leadership. Johnson's tantrum is more of the same. Republican men really mean all this talk about strict gender roles, and women in their party are starting to pay a personal price.
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