While Tennessee and Georgia, along with some 29 other states, are in the throes of reopening even hands-on businesses such as barber shops and salons, Congress instead is listening to medical experts.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, announced on Tuesday that on the advice of the House physician, they would not reconvene the House in Washington next week.
Rather, while the Senate’s 100 members and their staffs return to the Capitol, the House’s 435 members and their staffs will continue their video- and phone-conferencing. They will model social distancing, rather than government’s usual not-so-social-distanced huddling on the chamber floors.
The whole idea of Congress working on Zoom, a video conferencing phone and computer application, got an explainer and took a humorous turn last week on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” when the host asked California Rep. Katie Porter if the Founding Fathers would be “very anti-Zoom.”
Porter, an attorney and law professor, said that given the health crisis and the plethora of technology that exists, “having a Zoom meeting would satisfy the Founding Fathers’ idea of “assembling Congress” much more so than allowing Congress to become a sort of four-member body composed of Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.