Morgan Griffith on Congress amid Coronavirus

From U.S. Representative H. Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

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The coronavirus outbreak has upended many of the ways we go about our lives. As a Member of Congress, I believe it must not alter the essential duty I was elected to perform: voting in person on legislation.
To be sure, many of the regular practices of my job have already changed.
When I am not in Washington for votes, hearings, and meetings, I would usually be traveling across the Ninth Congressional District to attend constituent meetings, events, and other responsibilities. I am still meeting with constituents, but by video or telephone conferencing now. I use these tools to confer with other Members of Congress and Trump Administration officials as well.
But changing the way voting on legislation is done raises serious concerns.
The House Democrat majority recently put forward a plan for a remote quorum and remote voting by proxy, and then shelved it. I am glad they did so.
This plan called for proxy voting on the House floor during a pandemic emergency period, in which a representative could submit a signed letter to the House clerk authorizing another representative to vote in his or her place as directed.
Other suggestions have incorporated technology to allow for remote voting. While I believe that technological innovation can solve many of our problems, this is not one of them.
Remote voting would possibly conflict with the Constitution, which requires a quorum to do business. There is no pandemic emergency exception to our oath of office to support and defend the Constitution.
Remote voting proposals are also out of line with our history.
The United States has faced many challenges and periods of difficulty in the past, yet Congress still met.
If anyone might have benefited from proxy voting in our history, it would have been Caesar Rodney, a representative of Delaware in the Second Continental Congress. Rodney was plagued by ill health, including gout, asthma, and a terminal cancerous growth on his face, and on July 1, 1776 was in Dover. But when he learned he was needed in Philadelphia to break the tie in the Delaware delegation on the question of independence from Britain, he rode by horseback through a stormy night to cast his vote on July 2 in favor of independence.
Congress met during the Civil War, even with Confederate territory directly across the Potomac. At nights, planks on some of the bridges that spanned the river were removed to foil raiders such as John Singleton Mosby, the “Gray Ghost.” At several points in the war, Confederate armies threatened to fall on the capital. But the work went on.
Even in the 1918 influenza epidemic, Congress met, although at times it lacked a quorum and so was not able to conduct business. Telephones existed, but nobody proposed that Congress just phone in votes.
Circumstances of grave danger and hardship did not put a long-term halt to congressional activity before, and I believe we can meet this challenge, too.
Beyond fulfilling our constitutional obligations, the legislative process depends on face-to-face personal interaction. We can be separated by six feet and wear masks, but this interaction is still essential.
In Washington, voting is one of the few occasions that brings everyone together. We ask for support on one another’s bills, exchange information, talk about families, friends, and hobbies, and build the relationships that ultimately help move the process forward.
Additionally, being present when big questions are raised can clarify, persuade, and inspire. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech would not have the impact it did if he spoke in an empty room or sent it to be read.
I have heard numerous speeches or arguments during my service that shaped my thinking on an issue. Of those, I particularly remember an impassioned speech by then-Delegate Kenny Melvin, a Democrat. His speech took what was expected to be a close vote and turned it into a 97-3 proposition. I was not the only one whose mind was changed. Remote voting would have hindered or entirely obstructed these occasions.
The Virginia House of Delegates recently considered an even broader remote voting proposal and fortunately rejected it. Apparently, enough of them recalled the power of live, in-person speeches like Henry’s at St. John’s Church just a few blocks away.
The coronavirus outbreak has called for changes in our behavior, and some of these can be implemented in Congress without significantly interfering with our work. But the most essential task, voting, must be done in person.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.
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Editorial comment: It's interesting that, even within the same culture, humans learn to communicate in different ways. In cyberspace, I know there's a whole subculture of word people who prefer to conduct meetings and even socialize with friends by telephone...and for us the idea of video-phones, though potentially useful in some situations, is a non-starter. ("Even on the phone, people would be saying 'Oh your face twitched, what does that mean? It has to be something about me!' No way," we say, or "Even on the phone, I get to say unforgivable things and claim they were jokes because I pulled my face a certain way? Is that something other people want?" Though the face-to-face stuff may be useful in conversations with people who use it intelligently, and even exciting with people we find especially attractive, it's easily replaced by the sound of the voice in phone conversations.) We are a minority, and I'm not sure to what extent the word-thinking minority overlaps with the not-nearly-so-much-a-minority of introverts. We also tended to be the people who earned the top grades at school, which is sometimes confused with the much broader category of people who are generally intelligent.

Making all communication electronic could give us the chance to demand that all communication be done our way. And I'm sure Congressman Griffith is only one of the most articulate of the masses of people who would hate that...

As a word-nerd reading this e-mail I initially thought, "A little practice in the school radio lab would have taken care of that reaction." Then I thought, "No. I liked the 'Read the Bills Act' that's been a primary issue for our e-friend Jim Babka. Bills presented in Congress should stick to one topic, and it should be possible for the sponsors of those bills to read them in one day, so that they can be debated and voted on intelligently. We need no more idiocies like poor old Nancy Pelosi blurting out 'We've got to pass [this bloated rambling mess of a bill] to find out what's in it!' We need to know that in order for a bill to become a law, every word of it has been read and heard, if not by every one of us at least by people we trust." In order for that to happen, the members of Congress have to be able to communicate with one another, as well as with their constituents, in the way that works for them.  

Have you received those messages notifying you that your totally video-free cell phone will stop working? (All these years I've thought cell phones were a valuable safety device, but yes, I can live without one.) What about the e-mails warning of an effort to shut down the U.S. Postal Service? There are people who want to be able not only to overhear conversations that don't involve them, but to watch those conversations. They want to force all communication to be done their way.

The Seventh-Day Adventists have long been saying that the biblical book of Daniel foretells that the United States will eventually become the most oppressive tyranny on Earth and will destroy life as we know it (but that's okay, because that's when Jesus will literally swoop down out of the clouds and reclaim the Earth). Sort of a Left Behind scenario, yes, only they say most of the Christians will be on Earth to suffer through it.

What the book of Daniel plainly says is that even its author didn't know exactly what was going to happen. I have never accepted or rejected any interpretation of the book of Daniel. When I attended a Seventh-Day Adventist school and church I was asked, not officially but by classmates who worried about this, to choose my fellow cave dwellers in the event that religious persecution forces us to hide in caves. I used to think that whole scenario was far-fetched and mainly useful as a plot line for science fiction that was mostly not as well written as Left Behind; recent events are making it seem much more probable than it used to seem.