| With Move to Remote Voting, House Alters What It Means for Congress to Meet |
| Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52637"><span class="small">Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times</span></a> |
| Saturday, 16 May 2020 08:27 |
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Fandos writes: "The House of Representatives acted on Friday to allow remote voting and virtual hearings. The vote untethered Congress from its mandate to come together physically."
With Move to Remote Voting, House Alters What It Means for Congress to Meet16 May 20
Those earlier crises prompted novel contingency plans and prolonged recesses. But for 231 years, since the founding members of the body first laid out their rules in 1789, to cast a vote or fully participate in a hearing, lawmakers were required to be present, notwithstanding the state of the nation. To be a Congress, as the word suggests, people had to come together. “No member shall vote on any questions,” the rules adopted by the first House say, “in any case where he was not present when the question was put.” |
hen the House of Representatives acted on Friday to allow remote voting and virtual hearings, the coronavirus pandemic officially succeeded in doing what Philadelphia’s yellow fever outbreak of 1793, the Spanish influenza of 1918, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and generations of agitators for institutional change never could: untethering Congress from its mandate to come together physically.