Nancy Pelosi ruled Congress with an iron fist.
Not anymore.
And now Nancy Pelosi just lost the most humiliating fight of her life
As Black Eye Politics reports:
One of the best-kept secrets in Washington, D.C. for the last four years was that Nancy Pelosi never required members of Congress to show up to work.
That’s because Pelosi simply allowed “proxy votes” in order to pass bills with only a handful of people actually in the chamber in Congress.
And for years, the House of Representatives was a hollow shell of its former self, with trillions of dollars being spent thanks to bills that regularly passed with barely a dozen people in the building.
The reason Pelosi did this was simple: It’s easier to control members of Congress when they aren’t even in D.C. to vote against a bill she wants passed.
As a result, the basic functions of Congress effectively ground to a halt under Pelosi, who controlled the entire process and made sure that every member of Congress had effectively no way to do their job.
But now, Pelosi is no longer speaker of the House, and with the new Republican majority, the old rules of forcing members of Congress to show up for votes is finally being revived.
And Nancy Pelosi is terrified.
Fox News reports, “House Republicans have officially ended the practice of proxy voting, which was established during the COVID-19 pandemic to permit lawmakers to vote without being present in-person.
“Proxy voting was established by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in May 2020 to allow Congress to operate under COVID-19 pandemic protocols. Instead of showing up for votes, a member of Congress could submit a letter to have a colleague announce their position on bills and amendments and even cast votes in their name.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was only able to gain control of the gavel after agreeing to several concessions to conservatives in Congress in order to restore many of the rules Pelosi trashed, took to Twitter to announce the new rule change.
“No more proxy voting. Effective immediately, Members of Congress have to show up to work if they want their vote to count,” McCarthy tweeted.
For Democrats, the end of proxy voting marks the conclusion of one of the last “emergency” measures the party rushed through during COVID in order to solidify its power over the federal government.
And now, every single Democrat and Republican alike will have to actually show up to work instead of outsourcing their responsibilities to congressional leaders in both parties.
For Pelosi, the repeal of her proxy voting system marks a total repudiation of her rule from the last four years.
And even worse for her, it will make it harder for congressional leaders in both parties to control the entire legislative process the way Pelosi managed to for years.
And it is this loss of control which Pelosi fears the most.