Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, if I could ask the gentleman on the voting and whether it is in committee, clearly, there are rooms here in the Capitol--we have seen the Rules Committee utilize the Ways and Means Committee where they are able to be spread out at distances well beyond the safe standards of social distancing, well beyond 6 feet where you can have in-person hearings where the back and forth of a debate and the votes that would go with it where a proxy vote doesn't really fit that situation can occur. I would hope that we do that. This shouldn't have been a partisan exercise. I know early on we talked about trying to find a way to conduct our business where both parties would agree, and the minority leader and the Speaker were talking about doing that, and we thought that would be how it would end up. Of course, that wasn't what happened with the proxy voting. But even my friend just mentioned that if somebody proxy voted, then it would be for health reasons. Yet, yesterday, the first time where this new experiment that has never been done in over 230 years was conducted, there were Members who voted by proxy signing a document saying that they couldn't be here to physically attend proceedings, yet it turns out they were in other places. In some cases, it took them longer to get to a rocket launch than it would have taken them to get here to the United States Capitol, in clear violation of the intent of proxy voting. That literally was just on the first day.…”