In the name of COVID safety, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has OK’d “proxy voting” — which in fact has made it easier to win votes despite her razor-thin majority.
It lets Democrats (and a smaller number of Republicans) skip out out on actually showing up for work, but still registers as voting on the nation’s business.
As Stephen Jackson & Kyle Chance report for The Ripon Society, the “most jarring outcome of perpetual proxy voting” is that some House members have “taken to practically never coming back to Washington — sometimes not showing up for months on end.”
Florida Democrats Al Lawson and Frederica Wilson haven’t voted in-person since Jan. 11; Chicago’s Rep. Bobby Rush, since Jan. 13. That’s nearly the whole year.
Some Democrats have not showed up to vote in person in months. AP / Patrick SemanskySome exploit Pelosi’s rule to attend public events back home, whether it’s Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens) at a ribbon-cutting or Rep. Donald Payne, Jr. (D-NJ) doing photo-ops.
Jackson & Chance looked at 375 floor votes and found an average of 28.2 Democratis voting by proxy vs. 9.7. A third of the time, Dems’ proxy “advantage” made the difference in whether the measure passed.
What a way to run a Republic.
