The new Democrat-led House is looking to restore “proxy voting,” which was allowed during the Covid-19 plandemic. Progressive Representative Pete Aguilar claimed, “We want to be responsive to members and their growing families, and be helpful to that, while understanding the complexities of actually voting here in this body.”
Democrats eye restoring proxy voting in the House — with limits– www.politico.com
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House Democrats are moving toward allowing members to vote on the floor by proxy again after Republicans ended the Covid-era practice in 2023 — but the free-for-all rules that resulted in scores of members routinely voting remotely are unlikely to return.
Instead, members are coalescing around narrower proposals that would allow only new parents or those undergoing medical treatment to have colleagues cast their votes.
“We want to be responsive to members and their growing families, and be helpful to that, while understanding the complexities of actually voting here in this body,” Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, House Democrats’ No. 3, said in an interview.
Proxy voting is one of the many items House Democrats are weighing for inclusion in the rules governing the chamber in the next Congress. When Republicans took over the last time the majority changed hands in 2023, ending the practice was one of their top priorities. The then-incoming speaker, Kevin McCarthy, had unsuccessfully sued to block it as unconstitutional.
The practice was instituted in 2020 under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the depths of the pandemic and it was used by hundreds of members of both parties in the nearly three years it was in effect. But now Democrats say they are cool to fully resurrecting what had been billed as an emergency measure.
