The coronavirus threat has shuttered Congress for weeks. It has led to rare bipartisan agreement among some lawmakers that the House and Senate should change longstanding rules and permit remote voting.
Senate and House leaders belong to opposite parties but have been united so far in resisting the push for remote voting, which has never been allowed for full votes on House or Senate legislation.
Rank-and-file lawmakers, however, are pressuring them to find a way to conduct business during the deadly pandemic. Both the House and Senate recessed in March and are not scheduled to return for legislative business until May 4 at the earliest due to the threat of the coronavirus.
Lawmakers have been left sidelined and are grappling with the need to pass new economic relief legislation worth hundreds of billions of dollars without holding full roll-call votes.
Senate lawmakers have called on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to consider ways to legislate remotely. So far, he has not taken any specific action. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to pleas from her fellow House Democrats, called on her lieutenants to come up with a plan to vote remotely.
House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern issued a proposal last week that would temporarily allow lawmakers to vote without coming to the Capitol by instructing fellow lawmakers in the chamber to act on their behalf.
Democratic aides call the plan “low-tech remote voting” and say it avoids the security concerns that would arise through other remote voting proposals such as allowing members to vote in their district offices or at home on their computers. The change would require passing a House resolution, perhaps by voice vote or unanimous consent, and would last only through the coronavirus epidemic, McGovern said.
Under McGovern’s proposal, lawmakers who are not able to come to Washington would have to provide “a letter to the Clerk authorizing another Member to vote on their behalf and providing exact instruction, which must be followed, on how that Member should vote for each scheduled vote.”
The letter could be submitted electronically, McGovern said, and lawmakers present in the chamber who are authorized to vote on behalf of another member could only do so with specific instruction. McGovern said the proxy votes would count toward achieving a quorum.
Congressional leaders are under pressure from lawmakers to come up with a way to conduct legislative business.
The House Problem Solvers Caucus, which is made up of Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urging them to change the House rules and permit lawmakers to vote without showing up in Washington.
“Unlike the flu pandemic of 1918, modern technology offers us a host of options to govern from afar, safely and securely, during these exigent circumstances,” Caucus co-chairmen Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and Tom Reed, a New York Republican, wrote to the leaders. “Governments around the world, including England and Japan, have deployed these options, and are voting from home. Similarly, we believe Congress must be responsive to the changing operational requirements created by the pandemic crisis.”
House lawmakers adjourned in mid-March and have not returned due to the threat of the virus, which is particularly deadly for older people. Many House lawmakers are over the age of 60.
House lawmakers for the past several weeks have been meeting in conference calls to conduct nonvoting business but not without criticism. Even without voting, their high-tech solutions for doing business have run into problems.
Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, urging her to stop using Zoom videoconferencing to conduct panel meetings.
Maloney conducted a Zoom-hosted member briefing on women’s rights in Afghanistan with the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.
A hacker Zoom-bombed the meeting three times, Jordan said.
“Given the concerns surrounding Zoom’s security, it is clear Zoom is not an appropriate platform for Committee business, which may be particularly sensitive during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Jordan wrote to Maloney. “Please immediately suspend any current or future use of Zoom systems for official committee activities and take immediate steps to evaluate the Committee’s internal cybersecurity preparedness to prevent hackers from accessing sensitive committee information through the Zoom platform.”
