Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and his administration regarding the $1.7 trillion Consolidated Appropriation Act of 2023.
Paxton argued that this massive spending bill, which included provisions impacting Texas, was illegal and should not be enforced due to Congress violating the Constitution under the pretext of the pandemic.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas sided with Paxton in its recent ruling, stating that Congress, led by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had indeed breached the Constitution’s Quorum Clause in Article I, Section 5.
“Congress acted egregiously by passing the largest spending bill in U.S. history with fewer than half the members of the House bothering to do their jobs, show up, and vote in person,” Paxton
said in a statement.
“Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi abused proxy voting under the pretext of COVID-19 to pass this law, then Biden signed it, knowing they violated the Constitution,” added the Republican AG. “This was a stunning violation of the rule of law. I am relieved the Court upheld the Constitution.”
The original complaint from the State of Texas highlighted that on December 23, 2022, only 201 congressional lawmakers were in the House chamber, which was less than the required quorum of members.
The complaint emphasized that according to the Constitution, absent members are not considered part of a quorum and therefore cannot vote to pass legislation, whether by proxy or any other means.
In accordance with the Quorum Clause, each house has the authority to judge its own members’ elections, returns, and qualifications. A majority of members is needed to conduct business, but a smaller number can adjourn daily and have the power to enforce attendance of absent members as determined by each house’s rules.
Despite being limited at that time to adjourning daily and enforcing attendance, Texas’s lawsuit revealed that the House proceeded to accept Senate amendments to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 on that day using a new rule allowing absent members to vote by proxy.
Following a 225-201 vote approving the latest Senate amendments, the bill was sent to President Biden on December 28th and signed into law the next day.
The bill’s passage was not only unconstitutional, but it also had a negative impact on Texas, as stated in Paxton’s lawsuit. The spending bill introduced new legal obligations for employers in the state through the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and established programs that allowed the release of illegal aliens into the country, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s Case Management Pilot Program.
Various Republican congressmen joined the Mountain States Legal Foundation in filing an amicus brief to the district court last year, stressing that the “United States has endured for nearly 250 years because of our commitments to the Constitution and to representative government. The COVID-19 pandemic is no excuse to abandon these commitments.”
In his opinion on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix highlighted that for more than 235 years, Congress has interpreted the Quorum Clause of the Constitution as necessitating a physical presence of a majority of members in the House or Senate to pass legislation.
Judge Hendrix determined that the Constitution takes precedence over a 2020 House rule from when Democrats were in control, which permitted non-present members to be counted in the quorum. He found the defendants’ arguments against this position to be unconvincing.
“Given the Constitution’s text, original public meaning, and historical practice, the Court concludes that the House cannot count members voting by proxy to constitute a constitutionally compliant quorum,” added the judge.
Hendrix underscored that by “including members who were indisputably absent in the quorum count, the Act at issue passed in violation of the Constitution’s Quorum Clause.”
Although Hendrix found that Texas had not proven its right to a permanent injunction of the Case Management Pilot Program, he acknowledged that the state had successfully demonstrated this entitlement in relation to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
As a result, the court issued an injunction against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and their officials from enforcing the PWFA.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which served as co-counsel in the case, stated, “The Court correctly concluded that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 violated the Quorum Clause of the U.S. Constitution because a majority of House members was not physically present when the $1.7 trillion spending bill was passed. Proxy voting is unconstitutional.”
