Coddled Princesses and Stupid-Party Simps Is Not How We Make an American Revival – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

From the time I found out about her, I’ve had a positive opinion of Ann Paulina Luna. She seems pretty conservative, and she seems pretty, well … pretty. So those are a couple of things that would perhaps make her a decent candidate for high likability from these quarters.

But there’s a problem with Anna Paulina Luna, and it popped out this week in the middle of a legislative kerfuffle that derailed the business of the House of Representatives at a time when we simply can’t tolerate distractions and controversies.

House Speaker Mike Johnson endured a decisive defeat Tuesday after he staged an unusually aggressive effort to squash a proposal for new parents in Congress to able to vote by proxy, rather than in person, as they care for newborns.

Nine of his own Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting his plan, 206-222, in a dramatic vote.

It was a high-profile setback for the speaker, who rarely exercises the power of his gavel in such a determined way as he did trying to prevent the bipartisan plan from two new mothers — Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado.

“Very disappointed,” Johnson said after the vote. He canceled the rest of the week’s session, sending lawmakers home. “We’ll regroup.”

The outcome registered a sizable win for the moms — and dads and others who supported them — who showed no signs of dropping their campaign as they force the House to consider their proxy-voting plan, which has support from a majority of House colleagues. Some 218 lawmakers backed their effort, signing on to a so-called discharge petition to force their proposal on the House floor for consideration.

“If we don’t do the right thing now, it’ll never be done,” said Luna, who gave birth to her son in 2023.

When the AP uses the word “bipartisan,” you should understand it to mean “a left-wing initiative that has hoodwinked a number of weak or stupid Republicans.” Interpret it that way and you will be right 95.2 percent of the time.

Luna’s kid is 2 years old. Petterson, the Democrat who runs around the Capitol with a 4-month-old baby as a prop, is the real star of this show. And the mentality behind this is one that any Republican should see as offensive.

Namely that women must be treated equally to men — except for when women need to be treated more equally than men, in which case the entire world must stop so that women can achieve a satisfactory modicum of equality.

Like, for example, at the Defense Department, where Secretary Pete Hegseth has just restored the obviously correct policy of having one set of physical standards for troops to meet.

Back when the American military actually won wars, there was a single standard and no one was particularly conflicted about this. Our troops were expected to kill people and break things at rates that would make our enemies cower in fear, and this was an expectation that produced quite satisfactory results.

But the social engineers who insisted that the military be accommodating to women, and the pop-culture propagandists shoving Demi Moore in our faces alleging that women were as capable as men to meet those standards, forced open the door. And before we knew it, that single standard had devolved into multiple standards and tiers.

I’m not saying this is why we haven’t won a war this century. There are other reasons for that. I am saying that our military has become utterly chaotic because of the magical thinking and commitment to “fairness” instead of excellence that has so obviously infected it, and this has driven military recruitment into a state of crisis. The recent uptick in successful recruitment has only come courtesy of Hegseth’s renewing a commitment to pure meritocracy.

And meritocracy works. It works in Congress, too.

I’m glad Brittany Petterson is a committed mom. I know very little about her other than that she’s a Democrat, and frankly, given the fact that congressional Democrats have a 21 percent approval rating, my assumption is that her motherhood might well be the only satisfactory thing about her — not just in my eyes but also those of the majority of Americans. I would suggest that maybe, if showing up for votes on the House floor is too much for her to handle, she ought to resign and focus on her family.

And I don’t say that as an insult. Evita Duffy-Alonzo, the daughter of current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, reminds us that her father resigned from Congress because he was put in a position to choose his job or his family.

When my baby sister was born with two holes in her heart and needed a very risky surgery, my father, @SecDuffy, knew he needed be at home with his newborn daughter, my mother, and my eight siblings. So my dad resigned. What he did not do was demand an unconstitutional exception… pic.twitter.com/TFtLKFWeYq

— Evita Duffy-Alfonso (@evitaduffy_1) April 2, 2025

But, you ask, what’s wrong with letting Congress join the laptop class? This is the 21st century, after all! And besides, this is just for the new moms! And didn’t Nancy Pelosi allow electronic voting by proxy during COVID?

Right, OK. Now it’s the new moms. How long do you think that’s going to last before the standards for this collapse the same way they did in the military, which soon devolved from Audie Murphy to GI Jane and ultimately into a sex-change factory?

And have you seen who’s in Congress?

Let these people vote by electronic proxy and you will then have absolutely no idea who’s actually doing the voting.

We just had an entire presidency by autopen, and to this day nobody can tell us who ran the country during the Biden administration. And we all know the reason — if they had to tell us truthfully who was running the show when Joe Biden clearly was not, we would be so horrified that it would end the Democrat Party.

So now we’re going to normalize that and let Congress devolve into a virtual gathering of Mitch McConnells and Dianne Feinsteins. And we’ll do this … why?

For Brittany Petterson’s convenience and Anna Paulina Luna’s performative bipartisanship? When there is literally a nursery in the Capitol to take care of the young children of House members?

Bollocks and bosh, as the Brits would have said before they lost their collective marbles. Or as Tim Young did say…

I am pro family and pro mother…

But don’t tell me any member of Congress, who makes nearly $200k a year and is afforded child care, needs more time off when they’re a new mother and can’t show up to vote.

It’s a privilege to be selected by thousands of people in your district…

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 2, 2025

Mike Johnson was right to tell these people to go home and soak their heads for the rest of the week. Hopefully the public reaction to this whiny stunt will straighten out the nine Republicans simping for Petterson and backing this discharge petition so that the House can get back to work.

We have a country to save and a revival to stoke. Now is the time for Congress to step up and deliver on the promises Luna and her colleagues made to America’s voters — none of which involve increasing the amount of convenience and privilege our elected representatives should enjoy at taxpayer expense.

Creating this distraction is, on one level, unbelievably selfish. On another level, it’s so indicative of old-school Stupid Party Sideshow Bob rake-stomping as to make a marble statue blush.

I used to have a lot of hope for Anna Paulina Luna. Now I’m ready to see who’s going to step up in her Florida district to take her out in the GOP primary. This was unforgivably poor performance and we need a much, much higher standard than this.