Rep. Roy Urges Congress to End Proxy Voting, "You're Changing the Nature of the Institution"

Press Release

Thursday morning, Rep. Chip Roy (TX-21) discussed proxy voting while testifying at a House Rules Committee hearing on the matter.

Key quotes from the testimony are below.

"We have an obligation to defend the Constitution. It is my perspective that it is, in fact, unconstitutional for us to engage in proxy voting. I think that the Constitution is pretty clear on it. I think if you read the text of the Constitution, words like 'meeting,' 'assemble,' 'attendance,' 'present,' 'absent,' 'recess,' 'sitting,' 'seat' -- it clearly requires Members of Congress to be actually present in the House or the Senate chamber. I understand technology has changed, well, then let's amend the Constitution. Let's have a debate about it."

"I understand we can set our rules, I understand that we can come up with ways to represent we the people differently. But the contemplation is that we're not delegating our vote to another member. We can talk about remote voting, we can have that debate. But this changes the entire point...you're changing the nature of the institution when you hand your voting card off to somebody else. And that's effectively what we're doing."

"One of the most frustrating things about this entire experience is watching my colleagues blatantly lie when signing a piece of paper, and we all know it's true. We all know it. And we see it every day. But we just kind of countenance it and say, 'oh, go, yeah, go to a fundraiser good for you,' or, or one story was voting from someone who's out on an interview on a car in the parking lot, while there's somebody who's proxy voting for him in here."

"We get a 2,700 page bill at two o'clock in the morning, and the vote on the rule the next morning? 2,700 pages with 5,000 earmarks and $10 billion dollars? $100 billion dollars of increased spending, massive complex pieces of language and 2,700 bills, my staff is poring over in the middle of the night just trying to figure out what we're even looking at, right? That's no way to do business. So when we're talking about the institution being broken, let's start there."

"We all take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. We do. And I believe that we all, therefore, have an obligation to carefully examine the merits of the constitutional question raised by proxy voting. It is a legitimate constitutional question. We haven't had any long, significant hearings on it."

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