Analysis by Paul Kane @ WashingtonPost.com, April 15
The struggle to reopen Congress is more complex than just monitoring how far the coronavirus curve has been bent toward containment, then recalling more than 500 lawmakers to the Capitol. This isn’t at all like reopening a corporate headquarters in a city center or a regional plant in a suburban office park, where employees are traveling a relatively short distance to their workplace.
Instead, Congress functions much more like a large college campus. More than 10,000 employees, on a normal day, are spread across the Capitol, seven office buildings for lawmakers and committees, the Capitol Police headquarters, the Library of Congress and a dormitory for Senate pages [....]
The most basic duties — 100 senators showing up for a roll call, or up to 435 members of the House voting — are inherent violations of federal health guidelines that say groups should be limited to no more than 10 people.
And then there are the dozens of members of the House who, rather than rent or own a private apartment, live in their offices. Each morning these lawmakers use showers in the House gym to get ready for that day’s work representing their constituents.“People think we can do Congress by Zoom. Zoom is a Chinese entity that we’ve been told not to even trust the security of. So there are challenges, it’s not as easy as you would think,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday night [....]
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is in charge of the chamber's scheduling, acknowledged Wednesday that some things would have to change to make up for the lost time while Congress is shut down. He said lawmakers will go beyond the typical workweek of starting Monday evening and finishing Thursday afternoon.Committee chairmen have been holding teleconference meetings with rank-and-file lawmakers, but long-standing rules forbid actually holding formal hearings and votes on legislation from remote distances.
To change those rules, the full House and Senate would have to return to the Capitol, hold a debate and then vote on such changes. Hoyer said Wednesday that no such full return can happen until the “advice of the health-care community” is that doing so is safe. Whenever that time comes, Hoyer’s planned five-day workweek in Washington requires lawmakers to travel from near and far, most on planes and trains, to get to the Capitol.
Any return to normalcy would then involve several hundred lawmakers trekking back home after five days in Washington, then repeating that exercise after a weekend at home. That would place hundreds of lawmakers on two flights a week, the type of regular travel that many are reluctant to even think about now because of the constant exposure that would entail [....]
