America is in the midst of multiple crises and yet somehow the House is still stuck on the notion of proxy voting. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s push for proxy voting sabotaged the Republican agenda while once again trying to go back to having absent members of Congress. Speaker Johnson’s ‘Vote Pairing’ deal just perpetuates the farce.

Governing a nation is not supposed to be done from the couch.

If you can’t show up to vote, whether in an election or on a bill, then your vote shouldn’t count. Luna pushing to carve out an exemption for new mothers is how standards get dismantled. First it’s new mothers, then it’s a litany of other sympathetic cases and then we end up with a Zoom Congress.

There is a more compelling reason for absentee voting by the public then there is for absentee voting in Congress. Members of the public who vote are granting legitimacy to the members of the representative government. Members of the representative government however are there to serve the public.

Rep. Luna has said that we need to have proxy voting “if we truly want a younger Congress.” Do we truly want a young Congress? Is that some sort of consensus that we’ve arrived at? Yes, some members of Congress are far too old, others are far too young. Have younger members of Congress distinguished themselves in some way I’m not aware of? The stupidity and scandal ratio for the younger House members has been pretty epic and while Squad members, especially AOC, have strongly tilted those numbers, some of their Republican counterparts have tried to be online influencers more than actual legislators.

Government officials are not supposed to have a sense of entitlement. We don’t need them. They need us. If they can’t show up to work and give it their full attention, then they should step down for someone who can.