House gets lecture from Hoyer on tardy votes

If Congress is really just a junior high school for grownups, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) played the role of principal Wednesday, scolding members for tardiness.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) played the part of the outspoken student body president, saying people could get to class faster if there were more hall monitors.

{mosads}It started after a roll call vote Tuesday morning that was supposed to take 15 minutes instead took 25. When the allotted 15 minutes ran out, only 140 members had voted. That meant 280 members were voting in that procedural netherworld where time has actually expired.

A principal would go on the P.A. system or call an assembly. Hoyer went to the well, and shushed his colleagues.
“I would like everyone to be quiet,” he said, “because you’re going to be mad at me.”

Voting late, he explained, is getting too common and “is inconsiderate to every member who comes in a timely fashion.” More importantly, perhaps, “I don’t want to lose votes” because Democrats don’t show up, he added.

Hoyer explained he was as guilty as anyone of tarrying, but he asked that members set a deadline for when they start crossing Independence Avenue.

“Look at the clock, and when there’s five minutes left, come over,” Hoyer said. And then he indicated he might start enforcing deadlines a little more strictly. Anyone with a voting card in hand at the well at the end of the vote, he said, will be recorded.

“If somebody is walking in from the back and shouts, ‘one more,’ I do not guarantee you’ll be able to vote,” he said.

“You may not be able to vote.”

That rubbed Abercrombie the wrong way. He said a group of members were shouting “elevators” while Hoyer spoke.

He said they were referring to longstanding complaints that it’s difficult to get to the House floor when elevators are jammed with tourists ignoring the “members only” lights on the elevators.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to argue with Mr. Majority Leader,” he said. But he added: “That means you’ve got to do something about the elevators.”

Hoyer sought to interrupt.

“I mean it,” Abercrombie continued. “I’m not kidding. You’ve got to have police or doorkeepers or somebody keeping everybody out of the elevators.”

Hoyer, back to his principal role, offered no sympathy.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “if the elevators are slow, you leave with 10 minutes remaining on the vote. You be here.”

It’s no joking matter to Abercrombie, who noted that missed votes are a favorite theme of challengers who want to paint incumbents as lazy in televised attack ads.

“I don’t want to be told by somebody — the majority leader or anybody else — that I’m slacking,” Abercrombie said afterward.

Members, he said, are too polite to push aside “grandmothers and kids on Close-Up trips,” and argued that if they did elbow their way in, the media would jump all over them for it.