As top House Republicans anticipate winning the House majority on Nov. 8, they’re vowing to unwind changes in the halls of Congress put in place by Democrats in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is likely to become speaker in a Republican majority, has repeatedly stressed that he plans to scrap proxy voting, remove the magnetometers placed outside the chamber, and restore “regular order” by having legislation go through committees.
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The California Republican included related language in the House GOP’s “Commitment to America” platform. In it, party lawmakers pledged to reopen the Capitol building to visitors without requiring appointments and return to pre-pandemic rules that are free from restrictions after long having called for restored access.
The promised logistical changes on the Capitol campus are a direct rebuke to the current Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California.
“Madam Speaker, a lot of these changes that have been made are hard to change. They are going to be hard to change. We will change proxies,” McCarthy said in a marathon House floor speech last November.
McCarthy scoffed at different mask requirements adopted by the House and Senate, citing the Capitol rotunda, the midpoint in the building between the two chambers.
“We believe in science. You won’t have to wear a mask. I don’t know what happens in that rotunda, but the science shifts,” McCarthy said. “I am not sure. But once you get halfway past, I am not sure how the doctor writes that. Maybe [senators] have better filtration.”
The Capitol was first closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, shutting down its offices to all visitors as lawmakers sought to curb the spread of the virus. Its reopening has been continually delayed due to surges caused by new COVID-19 variants, leaving the building cut off from everyone except lawmakers, top Capitol staffers, law enforcement officials, journalists, and other essential workers.
GOP lawmakers in February introduced a resolution that would reopen the Capitol building, along with all of its House and Senate offices, and reinstate visitor policies that were in place before the pandemic. The resolution passed the Senate but has stalled in the House since being introduced.
The top Republican lawmaker on the House Administration Committee, ranking member Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, who helped lead the efforts in crafting GOP plans to reopen the Capitol, argued the changes implemented were misguided.
“When you’ve heard Leader McCarthy and me talk about some of the measures that Speaker Pelosi has put in place for the last three years, it’s not a surprise that Republicans are planning to get rid of them,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
“We had drastically different opinions on how to respond to COVID,” said Davis, who won’t be returning to the House in the 118th Congress after losing a redistricting-induced Republican primary against Rep. Mary Miller in Illinois’s newly redrawn 15th Congressional District.
“It was always laughable to think that COVID somehow behaved differently in the House than it did in the Senate because the House and Senate had tremendously different responses to it,” Davis said.
Access to the Capitol was further restricted in 2021 after the Jan. 6 riot, when thousands of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, which officially made Joe Biden the next president. Several new security measures were implemented in response to the attack, including the installation of metal detectors at building entrances, eliciting anger from many Republicans.
“The metal detectors — what a farce. That was something that Speaker Pelosi, in my opinion, used to keep the institution polarized rather than trying to find common ground. And as a matter of fact, you know, those metal detectors are at least for brave men and women in the Capitol Police,” Davis said. “That will allow those officers and the leaders of the Capitol Police to focus on the real true threats to the Capitol Complex rather than running metal detectors over a bunch of members of Congress who are no threat at all to each other.”
A handful of Democrats have also called for the Capitol building to reopen, pointing to waning COVID-19 case numbers and high vaccine compliance as evidence the policies are no longer needed. The Capitol has since been reopened to limited public tours in March 2022.
Republicans have also vowed to end the practice of proxy voting, which allows lawmakers to vote on legislation without being present in the Capitol building — the first time such rules have been approved. Provisions to allow proxy voting emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic and have continually been extended to allow flexibility despite complaints from several GOP lawmakers.
Republicans quickly filed a lawsuit against Pelosi after proxy voting was implemented in March 2020, arguing the practice violates constitutional principles because the Founding Fathers intended for Congress to meet in person. The lawsuit was rejected by a number of federal judges, who ultimately ruled courts don’t have jurisdiction over how Congress conducts its business.
Proxy voting became a popular method of casting votes over the last two years for both Republicans and Democrats alike. As of May 2022, more than 31,000 proxy votes were cast over 700 roll calls since the method was implemented, according to Cronkite News.
Most GOP lawmakers later withdrew their names from the unsuccessful lawsuit after the practice was utilized by Republicans on a regular basis, with McCarthy and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) opting to move forward with the legal effort.
But despite being used by both parties, the tool is expected to be axed next year if the party takes over.
Republicans are eyeing additional changes should they win majorities in Congress, vowing to conduct rigorous investigations to “rein in government abuse of power and corruption,” according to the party’s Commitment to America agenda. This includes inquiries into the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and the subsequent FBI raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home.
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Moreover, Republicans have vowed to create their own committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, denouncing the current panel as politically motivated. Instead, GOP lawmakers have voiced support for steering the inquiry away from Trump and toward security failures on that day.
Republicans are poised to take the House in November, with election forecaster FiveThirtyEight giving the party an 81% chance of winning control of the lower chamber. House Republicans need to net only six seats in the 435-member chamber to grab the majority for the first time in four years.
