Hill Committee Work to Remain Mostly Virtual for Now, Lawmakers Say

Congressional committees will likely continue doing much work online until the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers and experts told us. It's less clear how Capitol Hill plans to return to normal, given concerns about security after the Jan. 6 insurrection (see 2101060057). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week she plans to create an “outside, independent 9/11-type Commission” to study the insurrection’s causes and security lapses on Capitol grounds. The Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees are also doing oversight of Hill security.

Panels in both chambers are keeping procedures begun last Congress in response to the health crisis (see 2005180042). The House agreed last month to continue allowing virtual participation in committee business, including hearings and markups. The rules permit continued use of proxy floor votes, which drew GOP opposition. Even under a Democratic-controlled 50-50 split, the Senate is expected to continue giving committees wide latitude to do all-virtual or hybrid hearings with some in-person participation. The chamber allowed proxy voting for committee business pre-pandemic.

Senate Commerce hybrid hearings will “continue for a while” into 2021, said Chairwoman Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. The panel did confirmation hearings that way earlier this year for now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and commerce secretary nominee Gina Raimondo (see 2101260063). Buttigieg testified in person (see 2101210065); Raimondo appeared virtually. Cantwell was among lawmakers who attended in person.

The hybrid system is working well, Cantwell said. The timeline for returning to its pre-coronavirus operations depends on guidance from the office of Brian Monahan, Congress’ attending physician, she said. Cantwell wouldn’t say whether insurrection-related security concerns would affect plans, noting some form of the hybrid approach may continue “long after” the pandemic.

Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., acknowledged the pandemic-related alterations to committees’ work are likely to “continue for a while at least,” with a “return to normalcy” only once “everybody’s gotten” a COVID-19 vaccine. The hybrid approach “works” and gives all participants options, so there’s no reason to change it, “at least for the foreseeable future,” he said.

The Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees plan to continue holding hybrid hearings until further notice, said their aides. The Senate Homeland Security Committee will “continue hybrid hearings and social distancing when in person,” an aide said.

House Divide

House Commerce expects to continue "virtual meetings for the foreseeable future,” said senior member Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif. A committee aide said all committee business will happen remotely for now. The House Consumer Protection Subcommittee will “follow the full committee’s process, which is abiding by the public health emergency declaration in consultation with the House Attending Physician’s guidance,” an aide said. The House Communications Subcommittee held an all-virtual hearing last week on improving broadband access (see 2102170062) and plans the same format for Wednesday's panel on traditional-media disinformation.

Capitol security concerns could affect House Commerce operations, McNerney speculated. Capitol police and lawmakers are “doing quite a bit to build up” security on the congressional campus, “and there's going be some rules that are going to change,” he said. “I'm hoping we can go back to regular" committee gatherings "as soon as possible, but we’ve got to make sure that everybody's safe.”

House Commerce Republicans aren’t comfortable maintaining all-virtual committee operations for long into this Congress. Virtual meetings don’t “replace the important work that is done within the committee, when you can be in the same room and have the back and forth” during a hearing or markup session, said ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington. Relying solely on such meetings is “contributing to a further breakdown in the legislative process,” she said.

“We need to get back to normal,” said House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Bob Latta, Ohio. Markups, like the two-day session that House Commerce held earlier this month on its portion of the coming COVID-19 budget reconciliation package (see 2102120066), are “difficult to do remotely.” It has “been important for a lot of us” to “come back to Washington for committee hearings” in person instead of dealing with the “glitches” that sometimes plague virtual events, Latta said. He and other Republicans “staggered” their presence in the hearing room last Congress so “we didn’t have that many people" there at once, he said.

How soon normal operations resume depends on congressional leaders, said Ira Loss, Washington Analysis senior healthcare analyst. Surrounding jurisdictions will determine the size of public gatherings, as they have throughout the pandemic, he said. Watch for changes to restrictions on the size of public gatherings, he said. Loss expects the combination of vaccines and a drop in new cases to pressure states and municipalities to loosen up.

'Tradeoffs'

It's good that the House responded during the pandemic by “test-driving a continuity of government plan that they needed anyway,” and it’s likely the operations changes the chamber made in response will make it into the Modernization of Congress Committee's recommendations, said Lorelei Kelly, Georgetown University Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation director-congressional modernization. “Those things don't replace showing up in person” for committees’ activities because, as in all workplaces, “the serendipity of being present together” informs what lawmakers accomplish. “That makes me very worried,” because the people who have had the best ability to affect the lawmaking process since the pandemic’s start have been those with “deep Rolodexes and members’ personal cellphone numbers,” Kelly said. “You don't want to bake that into modern democracy.”

“Lawmaking is something you participate in in a specific place” and “the give and take” in those situations “is really important” to shaping legislation, said R Street Institute Governance Resident Senior Fellow James Wallner. “There are real tradeoffs that happen if this becomes the norm.” He remains critical of the House’s use of proxy voting and questions the constitutionality of proposals to shift to remote voting. The Senate shouldn’t try to shift to a similar model, he said.

Kelly and Wallner are concerned about how the insurrection may affect Congress’ operations. “The Capitol is meant to be more open and accessible,” so lawmakers will need to “balance security concerns” with people’s right to petition the government and “the imperatives of deliberation that require a give and take that I think is much harder to do with Zoom,” Wallner said. Find a way to improve security but “don’t make the Capitol another version of the White House” that’s all but inaccessible to the public, he said.

“You’re going to see this get discussed as a continuity of Congress security issue,” Kelly said. Some lawmakers “don't want to show up in the same room as some of their colleagues right now,” and “that’s unbelievably bad” for the institution. “You can’t have freedom of speech and convening and peaceful petition or any of the other stuff if everyone's afraid to show up because they'll be shot,” she said. “It leads to a lot of other conversations,” like “can you then create a sort of … digital federalism” that involves “satisfactory surrogates for the process of meeting in person in Washington?”

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series on how the pandemic is affecting communications stakeholders, including the public. An earlier story about virtual hearings is here. Our report about remote oral arguments is here. And an article about the FCC scaling back news conferences is here.