Proxy Voting

The House has always banned proxy voting on the floor.  CRS explains proxy voting in committee:

Before 1995, members could leave their proxies with one of their committee
colleagues to cast for them. This often enabled a committee chair, if he or she held enough proxies, to win a roll call vote even when the chair’s position was opposed by a majority of the members who actually were present.

Proxy voting was prohibited in 1995. The result has been to put more of a premium on
maximizing attendance, especially when the majority party holds only a few more committee seats than the minority. In those circumstances, the absence of only one or two majority party members can enable the minority party to prevail on a party-line vote if all the minority party members are present. It is very important, therefore, for as many members as possible to attend markups and for the committee staff of each party to know how to contact their absent members as soon as a roll call vote begins (if not before). Committee staffs may devise systems to keep track of where their party’s members are and may rely on members’ legislative assistants to ensure that those members are present when they are needed to make a quorum or to cast their votes.

The Senate allows proxy voting in committee but not on the floor.

Katherine Tully-McManus at Roll Call:

The House is expected to vote as soon as Thursday on a major, but temporary, change to the chamber's voting rules to allow for proxy voting as travel and large gatherings continue to pose public health risks during the coronavirus pandemic.

Lawmakers are expected to have to return to Washington this week to vote on an update to coronavirus pandemic aid for small businesses, and House leaders plan to use the session to also approve an emergency proxy-voting procedure in response to the health crisis. The change would allow an absent lawmaker to designate a colleague to vote on House floor matters on their behalf.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., announced late Monday night that if the Senate passes the small-business aid in their Tuesday pro forma session, the House could meet as soon as Thursday at 10 a.m., when a proxy-voting resolution may be brought for a vote.

House Rules Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., floated the proxy-voting and rule change proposal last week, in response to calls from within his caucus for leadership to establish a system for remote voting to allow the House to continue pressing legislative business during the COVID-19 crisis.

Many lawmakers thought that technology could be the solution to allow remote voting, but concerns about cybersecurity, outside intrusion and lack of time for testing led McGovern and House leadership to move forward with a low-tech proxy solution.

House members who remained in their district would send a letter, electronically, to the clerk to authorize another member to vote on their behalf and would provide exact instruction on how to vote. The authorization could be updated as procedural or other unexpected votes arise during the session.

Members able and willing to vote in person on their own behalf could still do so. Members physically present would be eligible to cast votes on behalf of their colleagues.

Lobotomy on the Hill

Frank Baumgartner and Lee Drutman write at Vox that Congress is working fine ... for some.

So who are these select few? They are indeed a small group, but not an inconsequential one. They include party leaders who benefit from centralized control of policy and personnel resources, lobbying groups withpolicy capacity to lend, and anybody who doesn't want Congress to be able to produce new legislation or know much about it if it does. That's about it.

Congress has given itself a lobotomy over the past three decades. It has eliminated thousands of staff positions, eviscerated its ability to carry out policy analysis, and generally has such low pay and difficult work environments that it relies on inexperienced and overstretched 20-somethings for the vast bulk of its work.

Before puzzling why any institution would do something so self-destructive and attributing the cause to irrationality or worse, we should consider perhaps that the system is now working just as many people would prefer.

Congress would significantly improve its problem-solving capacity under a reempowered committee system, with more and more professional staff to conduct policy analysis. Under such a system, committees have both the resources and the breathing space to tackle public problems. Congress would get more discovery on a range of problems, more information about potential policy solutions, and more capacity to solve problems.

By contrast, centralization of resources in party leadership means that information sourcesare tightly controlled, limited, and drawn into the zero-sum nature of partisan conflict. It's no wonder Congress is frequently incapacitated.

But change is hard.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE. 

Health Care

Kaiser Health News reports:

Uninsured Americans — the people that the Affordable Care Act was designed to most aid — are increasingly critical of the law as its key provisions kick in, a poll released Thursday finds.

This month’s tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 47 percent of the uninsured said they hold unfavorable views of the law while 24 percent said they liked it. These negative views have increased since December, when 43 percent of the uninsured panned the law and 36 percent liked it. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the Foundation.)

The poll did not pinpoint clear reasons for this drop, which comes in the first month that people could start using insurance purchased through the online marketplaces that are at the heart of the law. It did point out that more than half of people without insurance said the law hasn’t made a difference to them or their families. In addition, the pollsters noted that almost half of people without coverage were unaware the law includes subsidies to offset premium costs for people of low and moderate incomes.

Among all Americans, the sentiment was also negative, with 50 percent holding unfavorable views of the law and 34 percent supporting it. Views on the law have not been even since the end of 2012. Despite this, just 38 percent of the public wants the law to be repealed.

Most Americans say they have not been personally affected by the law. However, 27 percent say they have had a negative experience, while 15 percent say they’ve had a positive one. People with negative views chalked it up most often to the high costs of health care and insurance.

At National Journal, Sam Baker reports on a Democratic congressional brain drain on health issues:

SENATE

• Edward Kennedy (chaired the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; died)
• Chris Dodd (ran the HELP Committee while Kennedy was sick, retired)
• Tom Harkin (chairs the HELP Committee now; retiring in 2014)
• Max Baucus (chaired the Finance Committee during Obamacare markup; principal author of Obamacare; retired to be ambassador to China)
• Jay Rockefeller (No. 2 on Finance Committee; advocate for Medicaid; retiring in 2014)

HOUSE

• Pete Stark (senior member of Ways and Means Committee; career-long interest in health care; lost reelection in 2012)
• George Miller (Pelosi lieutenant; chaired Education and Labor Committee during Obamacare markup; retiring in 2014)
• Henry Waxman (chaired Energy and Commerce during Obamacare markup; long career in health issues; retiring in 2014)
• Allyson Schwartz (active on Medicare and the health care delivery system; retiring to run for governor of Pennsylvania)

And while Democrats' ranks have diminished, Republicans' have swelled.

There are now 21 members of the House GOP Doctors' Caucus (not all of them are doctors, but they're all health care professionals), and some still practice. Rep. Bill Cassidy, who's challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu, still sees patients—many of them on Medicaid—when he's back in his district, a fact he has emphasized while attacking Landrieu for supporting Obamacare.

The exodus of experienced Democratic lawmakers also means a loss of experienced staffers, health care lobbyists noted. Some experienced health care aides cashed out after Obamacare passed, heading for lucrative lobbying and consulting jobs, and some of those who remained will likely follow suit next year.

Ezra Klein on Lobbying and Corruption

“When we actually meet our congressman,” Lessig writes,

we confront an obvious dissonance. For that person is not the evil soul we imagined behind our government. She is not sleazy. He is not lazy. Indeed, practically every single member of Congress is not just someone who seems decent. Practically every single member of Congress is decent. These are people who entered public life for the best possible reasons. They believe in what they do. They make enormous sacrifices in order to do what they do. They give us confidence, despite the fact that they work in an institution that has lost the public’s confidence.

Lessig’s book is a theory of how decent souls have come together to create an indecent system. At its core is the idea of the “gift economy.” As Lessig explains it,

a gift economy is a series of exchanges between two or more souls who never pretend to equate one exchange to another, but who also don’t pretend that reciprocating is unimportant—an economy in the sense that it marks repeated interactions over time, but a gift economy in the sense that it doesn’t liquidate the relationships in terms of cash. Indeed, relationships, not cash, are the currency within these economies.

To see how a gift economy works, Lessig offers an everyday example:

I give you a birthday present. It is a good present not so much because it is expensive, but because it expresses well my understanding of you. In that gift, I expect something in return. But I would be insulted if on my birthday, you gave me a cash voucher equivalent to the value of the gift I gave you, or even two times the amount I gave you. Gift giving in relationship-based economies is a way to express and build relationships.

The key mistake most people make when they look at Washington—and the key misconception that characters like Abramoff would lead you to—is seeing Washington as a cash economy. It’s a gift economy. That’s why firms divert money into paying lobbyists rather than spending every dollar on campaign contributions. Campaign contributions are part of the cash economy. Lobbyists are hired because they understand how to participate in the gift economy.

Read more http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/our-corrupt-politics-its-not-all-money/?pagination=false

It Stinks to be in the Minority in the House

Here is more evidence of how lousy it is to be in the minority in the House. The party's leader can be hundreds of miles away during intense budget negotiations -- and very few notice or even care.

From The Medford Patch:

Nancy Pelosi took the stage at Cohen Auditorium on the Tufts campus Friday afternoon with the federal budget in gridlock in Washington.

"Minute to minute, hour to hour, we're getting reports," Pelosi said. "As long as we don't have to take something to the floor, I can be with you right now."

...

Before leaving the stage, Pelosi was presented with some Red Sox apparel for her grandchildren and a stuffed Tufts Jumbos elephant.

Interest Groups and Lobbying

See a report from the Center for Responsive Politics.

See a New York Times report on corporate charity and Congress.

Watch a video from the American League of Lobbyists:

A Timely Debate: Military Detainees, Trials in the News

Attorney General Eric Holder Addresses an Audience

 

The President Obama of Congressional Simulation 2011 showed a surprise change of position on military detainees for his SOTU address. Given the president's recent movement towards military trials, we were puzzled to hear the president speak out so strongly for civilian trials for all terror suspects. Ultimately, he came around to signing the Military Detainees Procedures Improvement Act of 2011. Today, the real President Obama made a reluctant movement in the same direction on military trials.

Jason Ryan and Huma Khan of ABC News report that five Sept. 11 suspects, including mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators, will be tried by military commission at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration made it clear that this was not its first choice of action for trying the case.

Attorney General Eric Holder "placed the blame squarely on Congress creating conditions where the Department of Justice cannot try them in a federal court," according to the ABC News reporters. Holder went on to say that their Congress's decision would gravely impact U.S. national security and counterterrorism efforts.

Congress "tied our hands in a away that could have serious ramifications," said Holder. "In reality, I know this case in a way that members of Congress do not. Do I know better than them? Yes."

Our simulation raised some questions about Congress ceding power to the executive, and Holder's comments point to a distinct point about the ways in which Congress can limit the power of the executive. By refusing to appropriate funds to hold Guantanamo inmates on the mainland or cover the expenses of the trial, Congress was able to force the Obama administration's hand on the trials of military detainees.

(Photo credit: RyanJReilly)

Black Hawk Down

Chad Pergram writes:

For every minute that Muammar Qaddafi remains in power...

For every hour that ticks by during America's military operations in Libya...

During every sortie...

An horrific set of images haunts official Washington.

They are the pictures of Somali rebels dragging the corpses of U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993.

Certainly the specter of Vietnam agonizes Washington as the benchmark for military conflicts gone horribly wrong. Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964 in response to attacks on U.S. vessels. But over time, the resolution proved to be the touchstone of mission creep. It constructed a gateway for the U.S. to get bogged down in an unwinnable conflict which cost tens of thousands of lives. That explains why Vietnam torments policymakers today every time U.S. forces are involved overseas.

But it was that harrowing day in downtown Mogadishu nearly 18 years ago that bedevils lawmakers, generals and administration-types even more now than Vietnam.

Which is precisely why everyone is wringing their hands about whether or not the U.S. is at "war" with Libya. It's why House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) fired off a letter to President Obama Wednesday afternoon, not ten minutes after Air Force One returned from a trip to South America and Latin America. The speaker demanded answers as to the "objectives of this mission, what our national security interests are, and how it fits into our overarching policy for the Middle East?"

It's why some lawmakers, ranging from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans, have criticized the president for failing to adequately consult with Congress before committing U.S. forces to this operation in Libya.

"I can only conclude that your order to the United States Armed Forces to attack the nation of Libya on March 19, 2011 is in direct violation of the War Powers Resolution and constitutes a usurpation of Constitutional powers clearly and solely vested in the United States Congress and is accordingly unlawful and unconstitutional," wrote Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) in a unilateral missive to Mr. Obama.

A Very Strange Story from Oregon

KATU-TV reports:

In the final days leading up to his re-election, several staffers of U.S. Rep. David Wu, D-Oregon, described his behavior as erratic, the Willamette Week newspaper reports.

And on Friday night, Wu told KATU News he has sought professional help from a doctor.

A Willamette Week reporter says staffers with the congressman didn’t point to one major development; instead, they said there were a series of incidents. The incidents were so troubling that, according to Willamette Week sources, employees deliberately hid Wu from the public during the last three days of his campaign.

Willamette Week reporter Beth Slovic says after seven staffers and three consultants cut ties with Wu after his re-election in November, she started digging deeper.

“Our goal was to try to begin to explain a little bit what the chatter was about,” she said. “It’s a culture of secrecy where people don’t speak in bad terms about their colleagues or bosses.”

More here.

Understanding the Budget with Pennies

Education Reform

The Los Angeles Times reports:

President Obama and Republican leaders are moving toward a possible compromise on education reform, spurred by widespread dissatisfaction with the George W. Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act.

The 9-year-old act imposes controversial testing requirements to govern how much federal aid flows to a school district. Republicans object to the act's prominent federal role. Democrats say the testing overloads the school day and is an unfair way to judge teachers, one of the party's principal interest groups. Both sides are alarmed at reviews that showed 30% of schools making unsatisfactory progress last year, a figure that could jump to 80% this year under the act's criteria.

Key Republicans say they are willing to talk. "The conversations that we've had so far — Republican and Democrat, House and Senate — have been very congenial and productive," said Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the senior Republican on the Senate committee that deals with education.

But discarding a controversial law is the easy part. Finding a solution that can stand up to the extremes on both left and right will be an early test of bipartisanship, and of Obama's well-advertised tack to the political center.

Parties and Leaders

Four Strategic Postures

...............................................Majority.............................Minority

President's Party........GOP 04, Dems 08...............GOP 06....Dems 10

Out Party.....................GOP 10, Dems 06...............GOP 08....Dems 04

Current House leadership

Current Senate leadership

Party leaders are not always in sync with their presidents:

Senate Republicans

As we shall discuss this week, a congressional party's strategy hinges on its numbers, on the composition of the other body, and the partisan identification of the president. When these variables change, so does strategy.

A week ago, Greg Sargent wrote of a poll showing that Americans want the president to be more conservative:

Today's Gallup poll, I think, reveals anew why this insight of McConnell's was so crucial. What McConnell was really saying here is that if any Republicans signed on to Obama's proposals, it risked suggesting to the American people that Obama's governing approach was moderate or even somewhat centrist -- something that could command some agreement. By contrast, when no Republicans signed on to Obama's proposals it made it far easier for them to paint Obama's agenda as ideologically off the rails to the left, which is exactly what they did.

If no Republicans were willing to sign on to Obama's proposals, that had to indicate that something was seriously amiss and that there was cause for real alarm about the overreaching nature of his agenda, right? And judging by the outcome of the midterms, this strategy worked.

Indeed, it's no accident that in the wake of Obama's successful passage of legislation with bipartisan support -- the tax deal, the New START treaty, the repeal of don't ask don't tell -- the new NBC/WSJ poll finds that the number who think Obama is "moderate" has suddenly jumped to the highest ever of his presidency. As McConnell recognized, denying Obama bipartisan support during his first two years made it far easier to paint him as an out-of-control old-style big government liberal -- and as a result, now the public wants him to keep moving to the right in the new era of divided government. Brilliant.

The Washington Post reports:

In the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency, Mitch McConnell raised the art of obstructionism to new levels. When McConnell and his united GOP troops couldn't stop things from getting through the Senate, they made sure the Democrats paid a heavy price for winning.

But now, the Senate minority leader who used to refer to himself as "the abominable no-man" faces a very different challenge: Can he actually deliver?

"The first two years, it was frankly pretty simple. From my point of view, they didn't try to do anything in the political center in the first two years, so there was no particular appeal" in trying to get things done, McConnell said in an interview, as he traveled his home state during a recent recess. "The biggest difference will be deciding when we are actually in a position to work with the administration, and when we aren't."

Tweets on the Hill

The New York Times reports:

Adam Sharp fits in well in the Beltway political scene where he used to work — first in the office of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, and then as the executive producer for digital services at C-Span. But his new job, as Twitter’s Washington liaison, requires a slightly different skill set.

Now Mr. Sharp, a 32-year-old with brown hair, glasses and a sprinkling of pale freckles across his face, is the human embodiment of Twitter, an energetic and smiling ambassador for that ubiquitous blue bird, ready and willing to answer questions, troubleshoot and offer free tips.

When Twitter hired Mr. Sharp late last year, his job was not to convince a few slow-to-adapt House members that they needed to get with the times. Instead, he is trying to help the thousands of politicians and government employees already on Twitter to use it better.

Since he officially began work on Dec. 1, the job has been evolving. (When Republicans regained control of the House, Mr. Sharp helped the chamber’s new leaders seamlessly switch their Twitter handles to reflect their new roles, John A. Boehner, for example, upgraded from @GOPLeader to @SpeakerBoehner.)

“His job strikes me as making lots of friends and helping lots of people, and who would not return a phone call from Twitter these days?” said Howard Mortman, the communications director for C-Span, who worked with Mr. Sharp. “I think he is getting incredible access, the kind of access many folks would be jealous of, because he is offering a service that many people want these days.”

Members of Congress and Life on the Hill

• General demographics
• Religion
• Burke's speech to the electors of Bristol
• Dreier webpage
• Congressional pay and benefits
• Congressional staff titles
• Congressional staff salaries

Health Care Comments

GOP Does Not Rule. Madison Does.

As you read James Madison Rules America, think of this Jake Sherman article in Politico:

Despite the chest-thumping rhetoric about slashing budgets, repealing health care and staunch oversight of the federal government, House Republicans are trying to get across a competing message: We are not in charge.

This message from the Republican majority, repeated publicly and behind closed doors at their winter retreat, amounts to a quick bid to ramp down high expectations in the early days of the new Congress.

“We also understand that we as Republicans do not control this federal government — the other party does,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said plainly, before introducing Govs. Rick Perry (Texas), Haley Barbour (Miss.) and Bob McDonnell (Va.) here.

The message holds mixed fortunes for the GOP. Too much over-thinking on who is in charge will elicit charges the GOP is trying to pass responsibility to Democrats, who indeed control the Senate and the White House. But it could also serve as a useful tool to lower expectations among voters who believe the new House majority will be able to complete ambitious tasks like repealing Democrats’ health care overhaul.

Mitch McConnell

In The Atlantic, Joshua Green profiles Mitch McConnell:

McConnell, 68, is owlish, phlegmatic, and gray, and often looks bothered, as though lunch isn’t agreeing with him. He has been described as having “the natural charisma of an oyster.” Yet you sense that this is not so much a burden as a choice, that he has pared away any qualities extraneous to his political advancement. McConnell has the relentless drive and ambition you frequently encounter in Washington. But unlike so many others, he longs to be not president but majority leader of the Senate—a position conferred by his peers and not voters, so geniality and popularity with the press don’t interest him. “Every answer he ever gives is geared toward strategy within the Senate,” says his friend Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, meaning this as a compliment.

...

“Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is,” says Jim Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. “Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to Friday, and doesn’t cover amendments. The following Monday you file cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that’s not even controversial.” All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Congress and Willy Wonka

Chad Pergram offers a neat analogy:

Congratulations, members of the 2010 Congressional freshmen class. Like Charlie Bucket in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," you've all scored a golden ticket. You have special entrée to the United States Congress.

Now the question is, can you make it out of the Congressional chocolate factory unscathed?

Or will vanity, arrogance, greed, lust, sloth and general misbehavior prevail?

The halls of Congress are wonderful, much like Wonka's factory. Capitol Hill features its own alluring versions of chocolate rivers, lickable wallpaper and edible grass. The temptations are great. TV cameras and klieg lights offer the beacon of fame. K Street lobbyists command your attention. People want to donate to your campaign.

Like in the Willy Wonka tale, will you suffer the same fate as Augustus Gloop? Will you fail to heed warnings not to drink out of the Congressional chocolate river and be sucked into an oversized pipe in the Capitol Hill Fudge Room?

Or will you wind up like Violet Beuaregarde and morph into a roly-poly blueberry after trying a Congressional Three-Course-Dinner? Will you get rejected like Veruca Salt as a "bad egg" and dispatched down the House garbage chute? Or, will you turn out like Mike Teevee and be shrunk to a minuscule size when you try to appear on the still untested version of Congressional Wonkavision?

Lettermarking and Phonemarking

Bans on earmarks mean less than you might think. For one thing, earmarks account for only a tiny sliver of federal spending. For another, there are ways around earmark bans. The New York Times reports on Senator (and former Representative) Mark Kirk (R-IL):

Mr. Kirk, for example, sent a letter to the Department of Education dated Sept. 10, 2009, asking it to release money “needed to support students and educational programs” in a local school district. The letter was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the group Citizens Against Government Waste, which shared it with The New York Times.

The district, Woodland School District 50, said it later received about $1.1 million in stimulus money.

In response to questions about the letter, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kirk defended the practice of reaching out to federal agencies to secure financing for constituents.

“Senator-elect Kirk became the first member of the Appropriations Committee to stop requesting earmarks and voted against the stimulus bill,” the spokeswoman, Susan Kuczka, said in a prepared statement. “He has and will continue to be an advocate for his Illinois constituents before administration agencies but will not request Congressional earmarks to be included in House or Senate legislation.”

Lettermarking, which takes place outside the Congressional appropriations process, is one of the many ways that legislators who support a ban on earmarks try to direct money back home.

In phonemarking, a lawmaker calls an agency to request financing for a project. More indirectly, members of Congress make use of what are known as soft earmarks, which involve making suggestions about where money should be directed, instead of explicitly instructing agencies to finance a project. Members also push for increases in financing of certain accounts in a federal agency’s budget and then forcefully request that the agency spend the money on the members’ pet project.