Representative Petersen and Proxy Voting
On April 1, Rep. Brittany Peterson, a Democratic representative from Colorado’s 7th congressional district, showed up to the House floor with her nine-week-old baby boy to demand support for a resolution allowing proxy-voting for new mothers. Petersen said that late in her pregnancy term, she couldn’t fly to D.C., so her constituents went unrepresented; then, after birth, she faced an “impossible decision” of whether to stay home with her newborn or travel to Washington to represent her district while leaving her baby at home. The demands of political representation in the House forced her to choose between motherhood or doing her job. This is a choice no mother in the twenty-first century should have to face, Peterson asserted. Thus, she showed up last Tuesday with her infant child to advocate for a bill to allow proxy voting (i.e., maternity leave) for new mothers for up to 12 weeks, claiming that “it is unfathomable that in 2025, we have not modernized Congress to address these very unique challenges that members face.” Requiring members to vote in-person, Petersen said, is “anti-woman and anti-family.”
GOP members of the House threatened to block the bill, but when Petersen was joined by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), the two used a discharge petition to bypass the obstruction and allow the bill to be brought to the floor for a vote. However, it took nine Republican House members, allying with all the Democratic members, to overcome Speaker Johnson’s invocation of a special rule that would have prevented a vote. While Petersen’s bill has not yet been voted on, her actions resulted in the rest of the legislative agenda for last week being canceled—including critical bills restricting rogue district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions and another bill on citizenship requirements for voting in elections.
Afterwards, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Petersen declared victory: “We said don’t f*** with moms”—hardly an eloquent and honorable explanation of the virtue of her position. Petersen’s stunt and her crassness are indicative of other problems with her political tenure, as she has been accused of advocating for illicit drugs, which earned her the nickname “Heroin Barbie.” While Petersen is a legitimate representative, she is hardly the model of Madison’s ideal representative who has the “wisdom to discern” and the “virtue to pursue,” the “common good of society” (Federalist no. 57).
Virtual Representation Then
There are many problems with the proposal of proxy voting for Congress, but the main problem is identical to what led to the American Revolution in the first place: virtual representation, which denied the American colonists actual representation by political officials chosen by themselves to be present and active on their behalf in the legislative assembly. Granted, there are some critical differences between the two scenarios, so in order to understand the problem with proxy voting, we must go back to 1765.
In April of 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which placed customs duties on sugar and molasses (even though at a reduced rate from the previous Molasses Act of 1733). This was the first aggressive act of the Greenville Administration, led by George Greenville, who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1763. The reason the Sugar Act was so contentious with the colonists was that it was a tax to raise direct revenue for the British government to use to pay back war debt (from the French and Indian War) and furnish more troops for the defense of America. While the colonists didn’t mind paying an imperial tax for the administration of the empire (and especially for the colonies), they bristled at a direct tax for Home Country revenue.
Yet if they disliked the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act was even worse. Proposed by Greenville in early 1765 and passed in March, it wasn’t set to take effect until November. It worked by requiring the colonists to do all legal and business transactions with specially-printed (and expensive) government-issued paper (stamped with an official government seal). Such onerous and unnecessary burdens incensed the colonists, and they put up such resistance that the Act was never enforced. The Americans believed that the Sugar and Stamp Acts represented an implicit revocation and denial of their right of self-government through their colonial assemblies as British subjects. If Parliament wanted to be supreme over their own legislative bodies it would have to provide for proper representation for the American colonists. Otherwise, Parliamentary supremacy without actual representation was tantamount to violating the consent of the governed, the destruction of property rights, and the end of liberty. The result would be slavery.
In response to the colonists’ complaints, Greenville had Thomas Whately pen a publication justifying Parliament’s actions. Entitled The Regulations Lately Made concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, considered (London, 1765), the pamphlet was mostly concerned with explaining and justifying the Sugar Act. Toward the end, however, Whately had argued that the colonists were, in fact, represented in Parliament, through what was known as “virtual” representation. This idea was an extension of how the representative system worked in England: not every borough had a Member of Parliament to represent them (i.e., many English subjects never voted), while at the same time, every MP not only represented their unique district, but the whole of England too. Thus, every English subject was either actually or virtually represented, and Parliament ruled for the good of the whole country. Whately extended virtual representation to the colonies of the empire, asserting that even though the Americans had no representatives from among themselves present in Parliament, Parliament was still legally (and therefore legitimately) representing them.
While the Americans admitted that the practice of virtual representation in England did exist, they argued that Greenville’s emphasis upon borough distribution was outdated. In particular, Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany wrote a tract in response to Greenville and Whately, Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament. Dulany argued that many boroughs with historic MPs were now shell towns, virtually devoid of population, while new industrial and urban centers had no MPs to speak of. In other words, England was due for a reapportionment of Parliamentary seats in order to better reflect English population centers. Dulany also argued that in addition to borough representation, Parliament contained two MPs from each county (similar to equal representation in our Senate), such that every square inch of English land was represented. No English property holder could claim that they were not, in some degree, represented in Parliament.
Not so in America. Not a single acre of American land was represented in Parliament, and the great Ocean separating the two continents made the idea of virtual representation an insult. While an English subject without an MP in one district could plausibly feel connected to and represented by an MP one borough over (or, even this was not enough, he could physically move to a district with MPs), the great distance between America and England, the material and circumstantial differences between the two places and their respective peoples, and the impossibility of American colonist moving to England all made virtual representation mute. Americans were not represented in Parliament at all, which is why they had long developed self-government through their own colonial representative assemblies.
Finally, Dulany (who had been educated in England, at Eton, Cambridge, and the Middle Temple) reasoned that even though MPs did rule for the good of England collectively, they could not afford to pay special attention to their districts and constituents if they hoped to be re-elected. Thus, even though every MP did, in a way, represent the whole of England, they still represented a particular segment of the people who had chosen them to defend their unique interests. Yet this only worked because the interests of the English people (as a single, homogenous people) were significantly similar even amidst some variety. The interests of the American colonists, however, were much different than those of English-born subjects; distance, time, geography, and over a century and a half of separate histories ensured as much.
Thus it was that the Americans, led by Dulany and others, staked their claim to just government on actual representation in Parliament by representative members from among them and chosen by them. Anything less than that was equivalent to Parliament denying the colonists their rights as Englishmen and deigning to reduce them to slavery.
Virtual Representation Now
Proxy voting today is not identical to virtual representation in the eighteenth century. Yet the core problem is the same, and that is the American colonists and those who fought for liberty and constitutional government believed that republican self-government required actual representation in the legislature by self-chosen representatives. While Reps. Petersen and Luna have been directly elected by the people of Colorado and Florida, they are not actually present in Congress in order to fulfill their duties as political representatives.
The retort to this, of course, is that while they aren’t physically present, they are there nonetheless in some digital form, which allows them to keep abreast of events and participate as needed (such as voting). There are two errors in this reasoning, however. First, true legislative work requires deliberation with other members of Congress, and such deliberation cannot effectively happen online or over Zoom meetings. We’ve all been in Zoom meetings and understand that, between technical glitches, distractions at home, and lag times (not to mention security issues), having a free-flowing and substantive discussion can be difficult. Obviously, speaking face-to-face and working closely in person with someone is completely different, and far more effective.
Perhaps Reps. Petersen and Luna believe proxy voting is possible because Congress currently is a defunct branch in which no debate, deliberation, or law-making takes place anyway. To show up to work in Congress is disappointing: the chamber is empty, aides and interns do all the heavy lifting, representatives speak to a mostly-empty room, and the majority of work is petty committee shifts or wrangling with advocacy and special-interest groups. In this environment, representatives may reasonably conclude that their presence in the Capitol is gratuitous. Yet to implement proxy voting because it currently fits with the way Congress operates is to only reinforce the problem and make it harder to reform the department in the future. The goal is to once again turn Congress into a deliberative body that makes laws in the best interest of the nation. This requires that representatives be physically present in the House and the Senate, directing and overseeing their staff and their work on behalf of their constituents. Implementing proxy voting rules would only make returning to this historic and necessary standard all the more difficult.
Second, if proxy voting works, even if initially only available to pregnant and new mothers, it will eventually be expanded to the rest of Congress. In a highly digital and fluid age, in which technological change, automation, and AI are being introduced at ever greater rates and into spheres of life that were once unimaginable, Congress may find that technology has so diminished physical and communication differences that remote work is not only possible but desirable. Indeed, representatives may try to justify such changes as allowing them to be closer to their constituents and to spend all of their time in their districts.
On the surface, this sounds good, because we have a real problem with our political representatives being completely alienated from their constituents and conducting business for their own personal welfare and that of their political friends. But the problems of representatives spending all their time in their home districts are that, as I said above, it makes true lawmaking and deliberation impossible, and in addition it raises the question as to why voters need representatives at all. If the digital age makes proxy voting for representatives a viable form of self-government, then why couldn’t the voting American citizen not directly participate in their own government through proxy voting? Is there any meaningful difference between me proposing legislation and voting from my home, versus my “representative” doing the same a few houses down for me? What does it mean to have a representative in such a scenario?
Thus, proxy voting for pregnant and new mothers is merely a wedge for the return of direct democracy, but this time in mass, modern society. This would be a disaster, and it would surely mark the end of American constitutional government. If skepticism of populism is in vogue on the left (and even in some ‘conservative’ camps), and if the weaknesses and fraud of mail-in voting have been exposed by the right, then both sides have incentives to prevent the over-digitization of our electoral politics. The advent of a mass plebiscitary via a website, program, or phone app would only exacerbate the excesses of populism and ensure that tech hackers could forever manipulate the vote. Fraud and corruption would only get worse, and the possibility of social unrest and violence would surely follow.
Mothers Belong with their Children, Not in Congress
In conclusion, it must be said that proxy voting is a band-aid to fix a much greater problem: the total conquest of feminism and egalitarianism that demands that women fill jobs, careers, and public roles long held by men. From board rooms to military brass to political offices, America has effectively become an androgenous economy. Yet nature does not relent. Men cannot get pregnant, and men cannot become women; and biological women are still the only way children can come into this world. Newborn children place unique demands upon mothers, as their mother is their only (proper) food source and the person with whom they form a unique bond and comfort.
What sounds harsh is in fact a blessed truth: women do not belong in Congress (or in any other high political office), and especially pregnant women or new mothers. The latter belong at home with their children, supported by hard-working husbands who can provide for their family on a single income. As President Trump and his constituents have often lamented, the overly financial, global, and service economy of our country has destroyed manufacturing and the middle class and has made it very difficult to be married and raise a family on a single income. Congress should be working to make this possible once again, not engaging in feminist antics pushing an identity politics that says female voters must have female representatives exactly like them, lest they be denied representation. This, of course, is an old error (the same one made by some Antifederalists) that contends that political representation should be based upon identical features, as opposed to shared interests across different social groups.
Unfortunately, the advent of pregnant wine moms in Congress and their male lackeys championing “women’s rights” only compounds the problems detailed above. It is a symptom of our malaise, not the next “glass ceiling” in democracy’s inevitable march toward eternal progress. The sooner we grapple with this and seek to correct course the better, otherwise Congress will continue to decline in importance and might, in the near future, cease to exist all together.
Image Credit: Unsplash
