House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has begun to take some small steps towards regulating the rules of the House moving forward.
JustTheNews says that McCarthy has taken a small but significant step in the right direction by ending proxy voting in the chamber. All members wishing to cast a vote on any measure under consideration must be physically present in the room before they can cast their ballot. This move ends the so-called proxy voting that members often used during the pandemic.
McCarthy tweeted the following:
Effective immediately, Members of Congress have to show up to work if they want their vote to count.
Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted proxy voting during the pandemic, but the Senate never followed through. They maintained the tradition of voting in person. McCarthy and other GOP members of the House filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in May 2020 that questioned the legality of proxy voting.
The slim majority of Republican members in the House is all that was necessary for McCarthy to begin making some changes to the rules of the House. He tweeted the following in December:
We will also return the House [back] to a functioning constitutional body by repealing proxy voting once and for all.
This new rule puts some members of the House in a challenging spot when it comes to some of the votes they might have to take. For example, Axios reported that Republican member Ken Buck of Colorado had to fly back to DC after undergoing a medical procedure to vote for McCarthy as Speaker. Every vote was needed to get McCarthy over the finish line, and it was because of this that Buck had to hurry back to DC to cast his ballot.
That is a significant change for the House. Republicans want to see these changes because they want to ensure that everyone who votes on anything in Congress establishes a record to ensure they are logging their votes in person and have a genuine commitment to the kind of vote they are taking. In other words, they wont be able to hide behind a proxy who votes for them and pretend that this isnt something they voted for in the future.
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