Will Congress continue using technology tools forced by COVID-19?
WASHINGTON — Congress, like corporate America and the rest of the world, was forced to adopt remote working technologies and other digital collaborative tools a year ago as the coronavirus shut down the global economy.
Now, as the pace of vaccination across the country picks up and a return to prepandemic normal appears increasingly possible, lawmakers and reform advocates are debating whether Congress should keep using the new tech tools even after the pandemic ends.
Some lawmakers say that remote video hearings, proxy voting, digital submission of bills and amendments helped members of Congress continue doing their work. But others bemoan “Zoom fatigue” and say the absence of physical interactions with fellow lawmakers may have worsened partisanship.
Unlike companies that already had experience with employees working remotely, Congress had to quickly adapt. House Democrats last May 15 adopted rules allowing remote voting and committee meetings after members fled the capital fearing COVID-19.
The Senate, then led by Republicans, allowed video hearings but not proxy voting.
Advocates of changes say Congress should take the best lessons from the forced experiment brought on by COVID-19 and embrace new ways of meeting and passing laws.
“The May 15 rule changes flipped Congress and dragged it into the 21st century, from threering binders to Zoom,” said Lorelei Kelly, head of the Resilient Democracy Coalition, based at the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University.
Eighth graders around the country were doing video sessions long before Congress got there, said Kelly, whose September 2019 report “Modernizing Congress: Bringing Democracy into the 21st Century” called for Congress to embrace new technologies that would allow greater participation from citizens in lawmaking.
The utility of technological tools that Congress was forced to adopt because of the pandemic was only reinforced by the Jan. 6 insurrection, which showed that the work of Congress can be disrupted and lawmakers ought to have tech options to continue functioning, Kelly said.
“I don’t want there to be a lower point for Congress to help itself,” Kelly said.
It’s a “continuity of government challenge at this point.”
In the past year, the House held 600 hearings and as many as 6,500 meetings on Webex, a video platform owned by Cisco, according to data from the company. The Senate has held more than 1,400 hearings and meetings combined,
Cisco said.
While the issue of virtual hearings didn’t become contentious, the switch to proxy voting, allowing a House member away from Washington to let a colleague present on the House floor vote on his or her behalf, became embroiled in a lawsuit brought by Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy, who called Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s adoption of the rule an “unconstitutional power grab.”
Virtual hearings allowed a more diverse group of witnesses to appear before Congress, most lawmakers and advocates of updating congressional processes said.
“The fact that I can have testimony in front of a committee from someone who’s in another time zone, without requiring them to come to Washington, D.C., really opens up a world of opportunity,” said Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-wash., chairman of the House Select Committee on Modernization. “To the extent that hearings are about access to information that can direct the work of a committee, there is more access to more information if you’re not solely dependent on who can be in a specific room on a specific time on a specific day.”
Kilmer’s panel, formed in January 2019, had issued a set of 97 recommendations before the pandemic struck, and several of them focused on infusing congressional processes with technological tools, streamlining schedules and providing greater transparency to lawmakers’ work.