Supreme Court declines GOP challenge against House proxy voting
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from House Minority Leader
Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) seeking to revive his legal challenge against the proxy voting rules that House Democrats implemented as a safety measure at the beginning of the pandemic.
The move comes after lower courts had rejected McCarthy's suit against House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), which claimed that allowing members to cast floor votes without being physically present in the chambers is unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court on Monday did not explain the decision not to take up the case, nor did it provide a tally of how many justices voted against hearing it.
McCarthy asked the high court in September to review a decision from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that found that federal courts do not have jurisdiction to hear such disputes between lawmakers over legislative procedure.
"Indeed, we are hard-pressed to conceive of matters more integrally part of the legislative process than the rules governing how Members can cast their votes on legislation and mark their presence for purposes of establishing a legislative quorum," D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in a decision for a unanimous three-judge panel.
McCarthy and 160 House Republicans sued Pelosi and other House officials in May 2020, arguing that the proxy voting measure was unconstitutional and broke the chamber's long uninterrupted practice of casting votes in person, even during national crises.
"It is simply impossible to read the Constitution and overlook its repeated and emphatic requirement that Members of Congress actually assemble in their respective chambers when they vote, whether on matters as weighty as declaring war or as ordinary as naming a bridge," the group said in their lawsuit.
But as the case made its way through the courts, many House Republicans warmed to the practice and the number of plaintiffs in the lawsuit dwindled.
When McCarthy asked the Supreme Court to step in, the only other House Republican still pursuing the case was Rep.
Chip Roy (Texas).
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) seeking to revive his legal challenge against the proxy voting rules that House Democrats…
thehill.com