OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The assistant to House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi has an absolutely Orwellian idea that could have been written in the Totalitarian Handbook.
The Assistant Speaker of the House, Democrat Rep. Katherine Clark has proposed having House members who do not wear masks sit in plexiglass isolation boxes, she said on her website.
“I write today regarding the enforcement of House rules prohibiting Members from entering the House Chamber without wearing a mask,” the assistant Speaker said in a letter addressed to the House Sergeant At Arms Gen. William J. Walker.
“House Resolution 38 requires your office to utilize authority under House Rule II, clause 3(g) to impose a $500 fine for the first offense and $2,500 fine for the second offense to any Member who fails to wear a mask on the House floor. These rules are designed to help minimize the spread of COVID-19.
“Unfortunately, these fines have proven insufficient to prevent some Members from repeatedly violating this commonsense rule. In fact, two House members alone have accumulated more than $100,000 in fines over the last year. This callous disregard for House rules endangers the health of Members of Congress and the professional staff whose physical presence is required to ensure continuity of government. This has only become more urgent with the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant and what the Attending Physician describes as ‘unprecedented number of cases in the Capitol community,’” she said.
“That is why, in addition to imposing fines, I am requesting that your office begin requiring Members who fail to comply with this rule to attend the House floor from the isolation boxes in the House Gallery. These boxes were designed to minimize the risk of exposure to quarantined Members, yet those who refuse to mask pose the same or higher risk of exposing individuals around them to COVID. This commonsense step will not only protect our dedicated House staff from Members who refuse to follow House rules, but it will also allow those Members to continue to fulfill their constitutional duty to vote on matters before the House.
“Thank you for your attention to this matter. I sincerely appreciate the diligence you have shown working to protect the health and safety of the House community since your appointment and I look forward to continuing that work with you in the future,” she said.
The firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green responded to the controversy in a way that only she could.
“I’ll argue that they may not be fit to do the job,” she said in a phone interview with Insider. “Maybe they need to consider that they are the ones in the risk group, and they should just go sit it out until they feel safe to come out.”
She and fellow Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde have amassed more than $100,000 in fines for not abiding by the House rules on masking, Insider reported.
Greene has incurred more than $80,000 in penalties and has been fined more than 30 times for defying mask rules, the report said, while Clyde has amassed at least $30,000 in penalties and has been fined at least 14 times.
The penalties are taken out of the lawmakers’ paychecks, according to The Times. Greene and Clyde — who both represent districts in Georgia — have been fined so many times that the House Ethics Committee, which typically puts out a press release announcing each individual fine, started announcing the two lawmakers’ fines in batches.
But Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky told CNN in July that Clyde had evaded his fines by changing his tax withholdings.
He said that the representative “went to payroll and had his federal withholding raised to $11,284 a month, so he only gets $1 of pay.”
“Of course, it all goes to his mask fine. But he’ll have to be elected until 3,324 A.D. for Nancy Pelosi to collect $15,000 in fines. Then when he files his tax return, he gets all his money back,” he said.
