The Situation & The Weekend with Michael Brown

4-11-26 The Weekend Hour 3: Congress had one job. Show up and vote and they can’t even do that.

·37 min·3 clips

Former Senator Ben Sasse reveals he has four different metastasized cancers while critiquing how political institutions fail to focus on big issues.

Why can't members show up? Brown opens in weekend mode, with the text line, social handles, and the show's house rules, then turns to a New York Times interview with former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. After that, the lecture starts. His target is proxy voting, which he treats as a dodge on voters who expected their representatives to be in the room. He gets procedural quickly because the procedure is the point. Proxy letters, public designation lists, and exact voting instructions become the machinery he wants listeners to picture. Count the bodies on the floor, he says. At the peak, one member could cast votes for ten absent members, which means a small group present in the chamber could act for the whole House. That is where his irritation lands. Brown's constitutional case rests on Article I, Section 5, the quorum requirement, and the plain idea that the House and Senate meet and vote in person. He knows the escape hatch too. In his telling, courts avoided the merits by taking a procedural off-ramp instead of deciding whether proxy voting survives constitutional scrutiny. Then he takes on the defense: each chamber can set the rules for its own proceedings. Brown answers by citing Democratic rules committee staff language about serious security, logistical, and constitutional challenges. It is familiar Brown territory. He turns a dry congressional rule into a sharp show-up-and-do-the-job argument. If representatives are counted as present, he wants them physically there. The close gets harder. Brown pivots to Kurt Schlichter's argument that Democrats are driven by contempt for people like Brown's listeners, their patriotism, and the country itself. Brown signs off in agreement. The hour ends as blunt talk radio: explain the rule, mock the dodge, and make absence feel like the scandal.

As heard by us

A proxy-voting fight becomes a pointed constitutional argument over whether House members must assemble in person to conduct business.

This episode centers on whether proxy voting can carry the full weight of House business, treating the question less as a pandemic-era workaround than as a constitutional test.

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Want to know how 20 present lawmakers could handle the House's business? Press play.

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