Arkansas Senator John Boozman found himself in a rather strange position last week.
He was voting for Mitch McConnell.
Literally.
McConnell has been absent from the Senate for weeks while dealing with health problems. But that didn’t stop Boozman, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, from announcing that he had talked with McConnell the night before and had McConnell’s permission to cast proxy votes for him during the committee meeting.
And, to be fair, proxy voting is allowed for some things in Senate committees.
So Boozman wasn’t just making up a vote and pretending McConnell had cast it.
But then came the vote that actually mattered.
The committee was trying to advance its new farm bill. Republicans needed the votes to get it out of committee, and McConnell wasn’t there.
Boozman tried to cast McConnell’s vote by proxy.
There was just one little problem.
That vote didn’t count.
Committee rules require senators to actually be present when determining whether a majority has voted to report legislation out of committee.
Imagine that.
Apparently there are still occasions in Washington when a senator has to actually show up to be a senator.
Without McConnell’s proxy vote, the farm bill failed to advance, 10-11.
What makes the whole episode especially interesting is that McConnell hasn’t been seen publicly in nearly two months. Boozman said he spoke with him the night before the committee meeting and that McConnell authorized him to vote on his behalf.
I have no particular reason to doubt Boozman talked to him.
But the whole spectacle illustrates something increasingly strange about Washington.
Mitch McConnell is 84 years old. He’s been away from the Senate for weeks, recently left a rehabilitation hospital, and is continuing physical therapy at home.
Yet Republicans were still trying to use his vote to move major legislation through a Senate committee.
At some point you have to ask a pretty simple question:
If somebody else has to show up and vote for you, are you really doing the job anymore?
And then there is John Boozman.
Arkansas sent him to Washington to represent Arkansas.
Last week he was standing in a Senate committee meeting trying to represent Kentucky, too.
Maybe we should be impressed.
Arkansas apparently gets two senators, and John Boozman occasionally moonlights as Kentucky’s third.
Odds & Ends 008
