Ed Royce: “in addition to authoring our Nation's Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote what are supposed to be the…”

“in addition to authoring our Nation's Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote what are supposed to be the rules of this House. His Manual of Parliamentary Practice was written in 1797, and for nearly 200 years, has by law provided the basis for our House rules. That is why I rise today in support of the Proxy Voting Ban in the House Republican Rules Package. If Jefferson knew that absent or tardy members of the House were routinely allowing other members to cast their votes for them in committee by proxy and that this ghost voting has been used to block legislation while ducking individual responsibility, he would object. He would wonder by what justification we could so stand the rules of this House which he wrote on their head. Although House rules strictly prohibit one member of Congress from casting votes for another on the House floor, proxy voting was in fact the norm in many committees in the last Congress. Ghost voting not only promotes absenteeism and sloppy bill-drafting, it allows party leaders and committee barons to control the fate of legislation by simply pulling votes out of thin air.”