Congressional Shenanigans

2005-2024 | 19 years

In this episode, Speaker Haffley waits to schedule a vote on stem cell research until the Democrats are out of town campaigning. To mitigate this, Congressman Santos and Cliff Calley organized a political stunt where the democrats pretended to fly off to campaign but secretly stayed in Washington. When the Speaker finally schedules the vote, the Democrats all come out of hiding and are able to strike down the bill.

Yesterday, the House voted on whether or not to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Republican speaker scheduled the vote because, by his count, the measure was going to pass by a single vote. However, Democratic Texas Representative Al Green (who the GOP was not expecting to vote that day) showed up to vote sockless in his hospital scrubs, having just had surgery. This made the vote a tie, so Secretary Mayorkas was not impeached.

Following this incident, some Republicans rushed to criticize Representative Al Green for “hiding”. However, some argue that Representative Green would not have had to pull this stunt had it not been for Speaker Mike Johnson scheduling the vote when he did.

In the episode, Haffley knew that if the Democrats were there, the bill would be voted down, so he tried to wait until enough Democrats were gone that he could get the bill passed. Each member of Congress was elected by the American people. Especially in the House of Representatives, the “People’s House”, it is important that there are not shenanigans going on that affect the implementation of the will of the people.