House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are "endangering the Constitution" to ensure that she has more power through a new proxy voting system, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday.
"Our Constitution, our country expects us to convene," the California Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "For 231 years, that's what Congress has done. From the yellow fever of the 1700s to the Civil War, to the burning of the building in the 1900s, then you had the Spanish flu, you had the 9/11 [attacks], we convened."
House Republicans said Tuesday they will sue Pelosi in federal court in Washington, D.C., to block the new system set up by the Democrat-majority House to allow proxy voting because of the coronavirus pandemic and concerns about the older age of most lawmakers.
McCarthy said that as a result, 63 Democrat lawmakers will not show up to work, but will still be getting paid.
He pointed out that Pelosi was able to push through a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, "the largest bill ever in the history of the United States," without taking it through the committee process.
McCarthy also commented on Trump's call for Republicans to vote against a surveillance bill that would allow law enforcement to access the Internet browsing history of United States citizens through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA, said McCarthy, was to have been about foreign surveillance, but in the Obama administration, it was used "to go after Americans" with the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and others.
"We want to make sure we protect and get all of the information out before we move forward on this bill, so I've asked the Democrats to hold this bill up," said McCarthy. "They do not have enough members here to pass that bill and they are doing it unconstitutionally so it wouldn't go anywhere because they're doing it by proxy."
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.