I guess the coronavirus has gone away, everybody’s back to work, and everything’s hunky-dory again.
Fuck you, Steny. Get back to Capitol Hill long enough for the House to authorize itself to conduct its affairs remotely, then y’all can disperse again - but keep on working, dammit, just like the rest of us who are lucky enough to still have jobs that we can do remotely.
And you bet your ass that on June 2, I’ll be voting for your primary opponent, Mckayla Wilkes.
Legislatures in Canada have been meeting with bare quorums, proportionate to the party alignments in the house, so that necessary work can get done while the memebers respect social distancing. Surely the House of Reps can do the same?
For the CARES Act vote, they closed the galleries so that many of them could vote from up there, and they could all maintain social distance.
So they go to DC, cast a vote that allows them to cast subsequent votes remotely, and they go back and work and cast votes from their respective district offices.
They shouldn’t have left the Capitol after the CARES Act vote without giving themselves authorization to conduct all their business remotely. Congress can’t just say they’re closed for the duration.
In any case, it’s not like there were that many actual legislative session days programmed, this being an election year. There were one or two non-session weeks programmed every month of spring and summer, the Party Convention dates were off, as were all of August, most of October, and three weeks of November. So there’s time to make up. And it’s not like the committee leadership and staffs are not going at it hammer and tongs during the alleged “recess” to have everything squared away by the time you actually need people in to do the final vote. “The Room Where It Happens” is now on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Speaking of final votes…
They’ve been trying to do that since late March, through the pro forma session and the Consent Calendar or Voice Vote.
Except that in the case of the US Congress, the aforementioned consent has to be unanimous, and as in the last go-around a couple weeks back, it only takes one monkeywrencher in either delegation in the House to say he will move for a recorded vote or for a quorum question and now you have to bring in at least 218 other people to resolve that the Honorable Member is a putz and shall shut up and sit down.
They’ve been trying to do something similar, though not the same through pro forma sessions and the Consent Calendar or Voice Vote.
(similar in that rather than a “bare quorum” you just have the top delegation leaders and the relevant-to-the-bill chairs and ranking members show up and do a ritual approval of what already the leaders and whips have squared away with their respective members that should pass)
Wherever ‘the room where it happens’ is these days (thx for the earworm, btw), there’s shit that needs doing in an expedited manner. If we’re gonna have universal vote-by-mail for Federal elections by November, it needs to be voted on soon, so that there’s time to actually implement it; it’s not like throwing a switch. And speaking of which, the USPS needs rescuing, and not just to make vote-by-mail possible. Oh yeah, and the general consensus is that we need a much broader economic rescue than the one they’ve already passed: wherever the room is, some occasional reports that they’re working on it, and where things are at, would be nice.
(Actually, I think now is a terrible time for closed-door negotiations. The public’s much more likely to be outraged by what the GOP wants to block than by what the Dems want, so you don’t want them to all come out of a literal or metaphorical room where everyone’s equally responsible for everything that’s in - and out of - the final product. While negotiations are in progress, the public should have a chance to weigh in. If the whole process is invisible from beginning to end, that’s a travesty of democracy. And right now, nothing’s visible. So it’s either that, or they ain’t doing jack shit in the first place.)
Or alternatively, they stay on the job in Washington, and do their job, even if it means risks of catching the infection, just like doctors, nurses and grocery store workers.
ISTM one tricky bit (because of course) would be that to pass the rule change you’d need all sides to agree that it would pass “by consent” or by voice and make sure that anyone wanting to make a pest of himself about it by asking for a roll call found himself somehow trapped in an elevator for the whole morning.
With that jackass we have in charge of it now, I think that’s pretty well the way we’re going. He’s invalidating every norm, every rule, every law meant to ensure the federal government operates. He’s been doing that since he got appointed so there’s over two years worth of proof for your observation.