House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy unveiled a way to reopen Congress safely.
The Republican lawmaker from California released his reopening plan Monday along with Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill.
"A Plan for the People’s House" offers four strategies that would need to be implemented in order to reopen.
“This pandemic has claimed too many lives and livelihoods already. We must not allow the institution we are tasked with safeguarding to be the next,” the GOP members wrote.
The plan calls for increasing social distancing protocols, adding temporary barriers made out of plexiglass dividers where distancing is “difficult to achieve” and a phased return for committees. They said temperature checks at office entries could be implemented. Other mitigation efforts like adding hand sanitizing stations are already in place.
The plan says committees should submit an outline to the majority leader outlining upcoming meetings with projected attendance. That information can then be used to create a calendar to rotate the use of larger hearing rooms. They said precedence should be given to bipartisan COVID-19 response measures.
The plan takes a slower “crawl, walk, run” approach toward using technology to conduct committee business. They expressed concern “for a variety of reasons” over allowing remote floor voting and virtual committee hearings proposed by House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass.
“Before we rush to discard over 200 years of precedent, we should require that rigorous testing standards be met, ample feedback be provided, and bipartisan rules of the road be agreed upon and made public to truly safeguard minority rights,” they said.
The Senate returned to the Capitol Monday.
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