A federal judge ruled Tuesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stretched the Constitution beyond its breaking point with her pandemic-era voting rules that allowed lawmakers to vote on bills without even being present.
Judge James Wesley Hendrix, in his groundbreaking ruling, also said a spending bill passed using the proxy-voting system was passed illegally, since less than half of House lawmakers were present for the Dec. 23, 2022 vote.
That means there was no official quorum and the House should not have been able to do business.
Mrs. Pelosi created the designated-voter system during the pandemic, saying it would help keep the House running while lawmakers grappled with social distancing and health issues from COVID-19.
Lawmakers were allowed to designate another member to cast their vote for them. The result was many votes in which dozens of members “voted” despite being elsewhere — in some cases thousands of miles from Washington.
The matter came to a head with the December 2022 vote on a $1.7 trillion spending package to fund the government for fiscal year 2023.
Out of 435 members of the House, 431 cast ballots. But just 205 were cast in person, while 226 — more than half — were cast by proxy.
Rep. Chip Roy, Texas Republican, challenged the vote, wondering whether a quorum of half the members was present. Democrats who controlled the chamber shut down the inquiry, saying they considered the absent members to be present through their designated voters.
Judge Hendrix said that turned the Constitution’s requirements upside down.
“The House lacked the constitutionally required quorum but sought to evade the Constitution’s limits by counting absent members as present in order to conduct business. The Quorum Clause prohibits Congress from doing so,” he wrote.
His ruling came on a lawsuit brought by Texas, which is protesting a section of the omnibus spending bill known as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and a section of the bill relating to Homeland Security’s ability to catch and release illegal immigrants.
Judge Hendrix ruled Texas had proved an injury from the pregnant workers legislation, and he enjoined that law from being used against Texas. But he ruled Texas didn’t show an injury from the migrant detention provisions, so he rejected an injunction of that section of the law.
The judge stayed his ruling for seven days to allow the federal government time to appeal.
The Washington Times has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Courts are usually reluctant to police Congress’s workings.
Indeed, courts in Washington, D.C., have previously shot down a challenge to the overall proxy-voting scheme based on legislative immunity. Judges in that case ruled Mrs. Pelosi was protected under the Speech and Debate Clause, which gives the House the right to set its rules.
But Judge Hendrix said the defendants in the case before him weren’t Congress but rather administration officials, so legislative immunity didn’t apply.
The federal government had argued that by enrolling the bill, Congress deserved the presumption that its acts were valid. The feds also argued that the issue was a “political question” that courts shouldn’t touch.
Judge Hendrix rejected both contentions.
He said his ruling wasn’t questioning the wisdom of Mrs. Pelosi’s designated voter system, and he said the outcome was limited only to blocking the pregnant worker legislation in Texas.
But he did conclude that the overall spending bill was enacted in violation of the Constitution, creating an opening for others to mount challenges to the ongoing spending.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who brought the lawsuit, hailed the ruling.
“This was a stunning violation of the rule of law. I am relieved the Court upheld the Constitution,” he said.