Roll Call : A Huge Docket of Votes Keeps Members of Congress on the Move

WASHINGTON —  Hundreds of times every year, a blaring bell rings out across the congressional office buildings, the sound seeping from the hallways to the private meeting spaces, even into the bathroom stalls. Simultaneously, scores and scores of pagers--strapped to lawmakers’ belts or stuffed into their purses--erupt into a symphony of sound.

All the noise means one thing: It’s time for another vote.

For 15 minutes after the bell first sounds, members of Congress must make the long trek from their private offices to the floor of the House, pull out a special voting card and insert it in a slot in the congressional voting machines.

Sometimes they will vote on weighty matters that will make the next day’s front pages. Other times, they decide arcane procedural motions. Regardless of the import, lawmakers have three options: “yea,” “nay” or a noncommittal “present.”

So often are they called on to cast a ballot--a dozen or more times on some busy days--that it’s sometimes difficult for members of Congress to keep track of the issue at hand. To prevent confusion, congressional aides follow the action on C-SPAN to keep their bosses up to date, and it is not uncommon to hear a congressman asking a colleague on the way to the floor: “So, what’s the question?”

Last year alone, there were 867 votes, nearly double the typical number of ballots a decade ago. This year’s total is expected to exceed even that. Through it all, members of Congress from the San Fernando Valley area netted voter participation rates in excess of 90%, a task that requires juggling their meetings, telephone calls, strategy sessions and personal lives to get to the floor in time--whether it’s an early morning vote on accepting the previous day’s congressional record or a late evening vote on an anti-terrorism bill.

For Californians and other far-flung lawmakers, simple geography complicates the act of voting.

Many members of Congress fly home at week’s end and return in time for the first vote of the week on Monday or Tuesday--if the plane is on time, that is, or the schedule is not suddenly altered.

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) was faced with a quandary in 1988, when a House vote on reparations for Japanese Americans happened to fall just hours before a long-planned fund-raiser in Los Angeles.

Through lots of hustle, he did not have to miss either one.

After voting, Berman rushed to National Airport outside Washington, where special parking spots are set aside for lawmakers. Upon landing in Los Angeles, his aides had a helicopter waiting to whisk him to a Beverly Hills hotel.

Although helicopters are a rarity, there are a host of means available to help lawmakers cast their ballots. Special elevators are set aside throughout Capitol Hill for members of Congress during voting. There are subways, as well, that whisk representatives from their offices to the Capitol.

Still, hustling to the House has become a bit more of a chore for many Democrats since the GOP took over the agenda.

“I really think that a lot of time is wasted flying back and forth to Washington and running to the floor to keep getting voted down,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said last year after Republicans had rammed initiative after initiative through the House.

Among the local delegation, Reps. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) and Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale) lead the pack on voting, missing just 1% of the ballots in 1995.

Of those missed votes, McKeon skipped one just out of absent-mindedness. He was on the House floor trying to persuade his colleagues to support the B-2 bomber and was so involved in his lobbying that he completely missed a vote on another matter.

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Moorhead, who has cast thousands of votes in his long career, missing relatively few of them, has the practice down pat.

If he is busy when a vote is first called, he waits until there is seven minutes left in the roll call. That’s exactly how long it takes him to stroll from his office in the Rayburn House Office Building, down the elevator to the subway and over to the Capitol.

“We’ve all missed votes we wish we didn’t miss,” Moorhead said recently, shortly before casting the first vote of the day on a bill strengthening the sanctions against stalking. “There are times you really have to hustle. I can’t say I’ve run; I’m not a high school senior. But I’ve hustled.”

Berman had a 92% rate in 1995, meaning he missed about 69 votes. One of those, on an appropriations bill for the Environmental Protection Agency, prompted Berman to receive a less-than-perfect environmental rating from the League of Conservation Voters. The group gave Berman an 85% grade instead of a perfect score because he did not vote against the bill, which included provisions opposed by environmentalists.

Berman had an 88% voter participation rate in 1993, when he was hospitalized for pneumonia and missed a string of votes.

But no local lawmaker has dropped to the level of former Rep. Craig Washington (D-Texas), who closed out his career in 1994 by missing 403 of 497 votes, for a participation rate of 19%.

When asked about his absences, Washington explained that he could best serve his constituents by staying away from insignificant votes. After he lost his reelection attempt, the congressman virtually stopped voting.

The National Taxpayers Union, a congressional watchdog group, was so furious at the practice that they filed an ethics complaint against then-House Speaker Thomas Foley (D-Wash.) for not enforcing a little-known law that calls for docking a member’s pay for unexcused absences.

Most of the time, missing a vote is no big deal. The absence is simply recorded by the Clerk of the House, duly noted in the Congressional Record and that’s that. Lawmakers, in fact, can add a statement to the record explaining their views for posterity, even if they missed the actual vote.

But missed votes do pop up at election time, with challengers sometimes touting them as evidence that the incumbent is not up to the job. And then there are the missed votes that affect public policy.

Last year, for instance, the Democrats successfully fought off a GOP effort to severely limit the powers of the EPA. The vote was a narrow 212-206.

But the Republicans turned the tables three days later by calling for a recount and coming up with a 210-210 tie, one ballot short of the majority needed to save the EPA.

Environmentalists were furious at Rep. Calvin Dooley (D-Visalia), who changed his vote between the two ballots. But they were equally steamed at the dozen or so Democrats not around for the Monday evening vote--including Rep. Pete Stark (D-Hayward), who was attending a Lamaze class with his pregnant wife; Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), at home tending a sick infant, and former Rep. Walter R. Tucker III (D-Compton), who aides say was delayed by a late plane.

None of those excuses would have held up the late Rep. William H. Natcher (D-Ky.) During his long career, he made voting an obsession, landing in “The Guinness Book of World Records” for casting 18,401 consecutive votes over 40 years.

Natcher’s final four votes were cast from a stretcher while suffering from congestive heart failure in 1994.

For Natcher, never missing a vote was a point of pride. He once turned down a chance to accompany then-President Jimmy Carter on a trip to Kentucky because he did not want to miss a vote. He flew back and forth from Kentucky to Washington daily for two weeks when his wife was hospitalized, unwilling to miss a vote.

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Critics said Natcher’s obsession distracted him from the many other parts of the job.

“Voting is the single most important thing you do,” said the chief of staff for one Valley congressman. “But there are times when you just can’t be two places at once and you have to make a judgment call. Is meeting with constituents less important than an insignificant vote?”

Toward the end of his life, even Natcher counseled young lawmakers to intentionally miss a vote early on in their careers so they wouldn’t have to worry about a streak. He confessed that his record became a burden hanging around his neck. “I wouldn’t say it’s an anvil--but it’s something similar,” he once told The Times.

California’s newest congresswoman apparently took that advice to heart.

Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson) missed her very first vote just two days after she was sworn in on April 16. It was a procedural motion on the anti-terrorism bill.

“I was unavoidably detained with constituents,” she later explained.

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Voter Participation In 1995

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Beilenson 99% McKeon 99% Moorhead 99% Berman 92% Waxman 91% Total: 867 recorded votes

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Source: Congressional Quarterly