Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendments to H.R. Usa Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity here to visit about what we are dealing with today with respect to proxy voting with respect to the previous question. And I notice that the gentleman from Massachusetts--and, first of all, and our prayers go out for the tragedy that you are dealing with in Massachusetts, at a significant clip worse than we are in Texas, obviously, regionally very difficult.
But what we are trying to deal with here right now is trying to protect the Constitution of the United States. And this is not something that is about slowing down the work of this body. I am delighted to work with my colleague, Dean Phillips from Minnesota. Right now, together, we are all working on legislation to try to improve the PPP, and I am delighted to do that as the cosponsor of that legislation. I am not here to slow down what we need to be doing to help work for the people of the United States, I can assure you.
I am here because the Constitution matters. In the various staff reports that talked about the options for us to deal with this, I would remind you that our Democratic colleagues acknowledge the constitutional questions that arise from proxy voting.
Let's be clear to the American people that we are not talking about remote voting. I, too, like the gentleman from Virginia, have very serious constitutional reservations about remote voting, but let's have that debate. Let's have a thorough debate about that. But we are talking about proxy voting.
For those people who are watching this back at home, understand what that means. That means that a Member of this body who has been delegated to them the responsibility from their constituents to vote for them, to argue for them, to be on this body representing them, is taking that solemn duty and handing it to another, and in some cases, 5 or 10 Members handing it to another.
That undermines our body. It dilutes the representation of our constituent. It dilutes those of us as Members and the power and importance that is entrusted to us to represent our constituents.
This is what is at stake, and this is what we are talking about, and this is why we have filed litigation.
I would rather that we address this in this body, but in talking to the Parliamentarian, I was advised there was nothing we could do, that when the House voted 10, 12 days ago----
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I was advised that we could do nothing in this body to address the constitutional infirmity of literally transferring our constitutionally vested authority to represent our constituents to another. Therefore, I was told, and I believe that is the case, we have to go to the courts, the Article III courts, to express our concern that this is constitutionally infirm.
This is not about setting our own rules. This is about directly opposing the structure of the Constitution in which we represent our constituents.
Keep in mind that at the time of our founding in 1793, in the heat of yellow fever, 5,000 Philadelphians died out of a population of 50,000. That is 10 percent. That would be 180,000 or 160,000 today. Yet, what happened? James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were all working to figure out how this body could continue to meet in person. They didn't adopt proxy voting. They figured out how to work to meet.
There is a letter sent from James Madison to George Washington on October 24, 1793, talking about this very issue, that in a pandemic, this body should meet.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, this body should continue to meet. That letter from James Madison, the father of the Constitution, to the father of our country, George Washington, expressly lays out what he is talking about to try to protect our duty to meet as a body, the requirement of physical presence, the requirement that we meet together, to look each other in the eye to do our duty to represent our constituents.
This is not about slowing down the work of this body. This is about doing our duty to uphold the Constitution and finding a way to navigate through the difficulties of the current moment.
We got through yellow fever. We got through world wars. We got through the Spanish flu. We got through a Civil War. And we managed to figure out how to do our job. Our Founders got through smallpox. I would implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, let us not adopt this proxy voting in which we turn over our solemn duty to another Member. Let us work together to find out how to get through this in a way that respects the Constitution. That is why we are here.
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