Missing congresswoman's case shows Congress needs new rules on attendance

Have you ever heard of Kay Granger ? Probably not. She’s a Republican congresswoman from Texas who has been in office almost 30 years.

But that’s not why I’m writing about her. I’m writing about her because she hadn’t been in her office or even seen for six months. She was just gone — poof. And there wasn’t really anything the House was able or willing to do about it. That has to change.

If you stopped showing up to work, what would happen? After a series of unanswered phone calls and emails, you’d be fired.

In Congress, though, there is no boss to fire anyone. There is a Speaker of the House, who can call for a vote for expel members who violate their oaths of office or for egregious violations of Congressional ethics, but that happens only rarely. In 1983, Rep. Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) admitted to having sex with an underage House page and “made sexual advances” toward two other kids. He was censured, and he turned his back on the chamber as it voted. Then he was reelected, repeatedly, until 1997.

If contempt in the face of your exposure for molesting pages can’t get you booted from the House, almost nothing can. More recently, Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) was actually expelled, but it took a federal indictment to make Congress act.

In that context, a mere poor attendance record is not going to get you removed. We know this because Granger was AWOL for half the year, for crying out loud. She didn’t run for reelection, but probably only because she would have had to offer proof of life to the voters at some point.

Granger was recently discovered living in a $4,000 per month nursing home that specializes in treating dementia patients. Certainly no one would wish that on anyone, but Granger should not have clung to her job if she was not capable of doing it. As matters stand, her constituents have had no representation in the House for a very long time. 

Just to be clear, the office itself still functions as far as constituents are concerned. Anyone seeking casework help will get the same service they always have, whatever level that office maintained. What they won’t get is a vote on anything.

It is likely either that the chief of staff steps up and leads the employees or no one does and the office becomes a base of operations for people who clock-watch all day — if they bother to show up at all. In either case, in committees and on the floor, the people of Texas's 12th Congressional District had no say in anything. 

You might wonder how someone could simply disappear, not do their job at all and face zero consequences. That’s because, outside of Election Day, the only mechanism to hold members of Congress to any standards at all is ... other members of Congress. 

Members are reluctant to support kicking out others for sex scandals or health issues because they often have sex scandals or health issues themselves, or expect to in the future. Mutual self-preservation makes for good job security.

Sure, they booted Santos, but he was a clown more interested in attention than his job anyway. They will pick the easy fruit, if only so they can claim to be farmers. 

When it comes to corruption, Congress is just okay at policing itself. When it comes to health, it is horrible. Former Republican Illinois Senator Mark Kirk suffered a stroke in January of 2012 and wasn’t able to resume his duties for more than a year. Former Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson suffered a brain bleed during a radio interview in December 2006 and wasn’t able to go back to work until September 2007. Both men, like Congresswoman Granger, should have been removed from their jobs.

Help them keep their pay or insurance or whatever (they technically work 24 hours a day, so a case could be made that they were on the job), but their constituents need a say in the business of government. Without some mechanism to remove members who cannot do the job, the idea of public service becomes reversed in cases of incapacitation.

That may not sound fair, but this is not fair to the people who entrusted their voices to someone who cannot show up to speak.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).