1) Coronavirus has claimed an unlikely victim in Congress - at least for a while: the custom of the roll call vote. Votes are supposed to run 15 minutes in both the House & Senate. But they often run longer You try to get either 435 or 100 people in the same room at the same time

2) Votes run long for a couple of reasons. Some mbrs are just habitually late. Mbrs are often quadruple scheduled.

3) The late Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) often presided over the Hse during big votes. At a 2007 hearing probing House voting practices, the Ohio Republican presciently observed the following: “The same people who were late to votes 15 years ago are the same ones late today.”

4) When it comes to a vote, Congress distills the quintessence of challenging, global policy issues into an unvarnished, binary choice. Yes or no. Yea or nay. Either, or. But there’s another important reason the Hse/Senate often elongate votes. It has nothing to do w/tardiness.

5) Members don’t have a lot of time to get to know one another. To chat. To talk. To understand what makes each other tick. The same goes for Congressional leaders. They need time to talk with members to see what problems they may have with legislation.

6) The House and Senate floors are part social club, therapy session, locker room and legislative crucible. It’s one of the few places where members have face-to-face conversations with one another from both sides. This is where the gears of government churn, making things happen

7) Watch lawmakers congregate near the rear of a chamber or in the well during a vote. It’s negotiation. Give and take. Finding consensus. Understanding what the other side is up to. The floor is where members go to get things done.

8) The leadership sometimes holds a vote open so they can deploy their whip teams to find members on the floor and get a good vote count on an upcoming bill.

9) Sometimes the leadership deliberately adds a procedural vote or two in a vote sequence so they can spend more time talking to members to understand their concerns about legislation or make sure that vote count is ironclad.

10) There is no substitution for face-to-face contact between members. Certainly lawmakers can accomplish a lot on telephone calls. But a heart-to-heart in the Majority Leader’s Office or a serious chat in the cloakroom, ear-to-ear, is what greases the machinery on Capitol Hill.

11) As one former member confided to Fox, it’s essential that lawmakers be around one another to pick up non-verbal cues and nuance. You can’t trade 231 years of Congressional DNA for Zoom.

12) Congress likely needs to spend more money to combat coronavirus. Do mbrs * aides even want to be in the same room anytime soon to negotiate that legislation? Is that safe? But it underscores the point that it’s just a lot harder to conduct the nation’s business on Skype.

13) The Hse/Senate floors are transactional places. A roll call vote may be the purpose which draws members to the floor. But it’s what unfolds around the vote which is often more important than the vote itself. That’s why it’s now a struggle to get things done now on CapHill