At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the House of Representatives adopted a new rule allowing members, for the first time, to cast votes remotely via a proxy.
Now, with the Delta variant on the rise, Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to extend the use of proxy voting through the fall, and possibly until the end of the year, Axios first reported.
Although not without its criticisms, this procedural change has kept congressional operations afloat at a time when it's been unsafe for members to convene in person.
During the public health emergency, proxy voting allows House members who are unable to vote in person to designate a colleague to record an in-person vote for them, under strict instructions. A member may vote on behalf of up to 10 of their colleagues. The procedural change also allows hearings to be conducted virtually.
This emergency measure was first enacted in May 2020 and has been extended every few months since as the pandemic has persisted. The latest extension is set to expire Aug. 17. Currently, 126 House members have active proxy orders in place.
When proxy voting was first adopted, however, GOP House members sharply criticized its use, filing a federal lawsuit that claimed the voting method was unconstitutional. The suit was ultimately dismissed in August 2020.
More recently, however, proxy voting has become a tool of convenience for both Republicans and Democrats. With most members of Congress vaccinated, lawmakers are now using remote voting to spend more time in their districts, attending campaign events and avoiding a long commute to Washington.
To prevent proxy voting from being misused in this way, Marci Harris, CEO of the nonpartisan civic engagement platform Popvox, said clear guidelines need to be set around how members should use remote voting.
"That abuse — and the failure of the House to hold members who violate the rules to account — dilutes the important continuity function that proxy voting (or other forms of remote voting) serves," Harris said.
Proxy voting has been an important tool for Congress during the pandemic, and it should continue to be considered for future emergency situations, Harris added. Last year, in the early days of the pandemic, her organization participated in mock remote hearing exercises to test the viability of virtual congressional proceedings during the pandemic. The exercises were successful and overwhelmingly supported by the former members of Congress, from both parties, who participated.
Moving forward, expansions to proxy voting should be considered, said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, another organization that participated in the exercises. For instance, he would also like to see the Senate adopt some form of remote voting.
But at the very least, Schuman said, while there is still a public health crisis, the current system should remain in place so that members who are immunocompromised or have young children can continue to safely vote on legislation.
"Proxy voting has allowed the Congress to stay open in a circumstance where they wouldn't have necessarily been able to do as much otherwise," Schuman said. "Every single American deserves to have representation in Congress, and this is a mechanism to ensure that everybody's representative who is mentally capable of participating is able to do so themselves."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.