The Biden administration has mounted a legal challenge to a Texas judge’s ruling that found Congress unconstitutionally passed a $1.7 trillion omnibus funding bill in 2022 because lawmakers cast votes without being physically present, relying on a pandemic-era proxy voting rule.
In an appeal filed at the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Aug. 9, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that a Texas district court erred in finding that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 was not duly enacted because it passed in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Quorum Clause.
“The district court’s holding is a remarkable intrusion into the internal proceedings of a coordinate branch of government, and it has no basis in the Quorum Clause’s text, history, or purpose,” DOJ attorneys wrote in the filing, arguing that members of Congress who voted remotely did so in line with House rules that permitted proxy voting and were not “absent” from legislative business, as the district court had found….