McCarthy faces make or break moment with proxy voting case

The high court will decide as soon as Friday whether to take up the lawsuit that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and fellow House Republicans brought against a measure allowing proxy voting in the chamber. They’re fighting against the odds on multiple fronts: Not only did a federal appeals court previously dismiss the case, but more than half of McCarthy’s own conference took their name off the anti-proxy-voting lawsuit after initially signing on.

That’s not stopping the California Republican. Despite the flood of his members who abandoned the court challenge and started taking advantage of Democrats’ Covid-era remote voting rules, McCarthy says he’s committed to revoking it in 2023 if his party takes back the House.

“I wouldn’t use it just for power like the Democrats,” McCarthy said in an interview, adding that a tool intended to be “tightly controlled” has instead “expanded to something that we always feared.”