Noah Feldman, Columnist

Work From Home Is a Bad Option for U.S. Congress

The Constitution allows the House and Senate to make their own rules, but that’s no reason to embrace vote-by-Zoom.

October 7, 2020 at 12:30 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Covid-19 is spreading through the White House and Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, major congressional votes are coming on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett in the Senate and maybe a national bailout package in the House of Representatives. So it’s time to revisit an issue that came up early in the pandemic but was never properly resolved: Could Congress vote remotely? And if so, would be a good idea?

It’s never been tried. The Constitution gives Congress power over its own rules, which would seem to let the two houses adopt remote voting if they wanted. Traditionally, the courts defer to Congress’s judgment when Congress is exercising a power that is textually allocated to it by the Constitution.