You're Paying $174,000 a Year for an Empty Chair

Members of Congress earn $174,000 a year in base salary. Leadership earns more. They get federal health insurance, pension benefits, and a staff funded by taxpayers.

In exchange, they're supposed to show up and vote.

A lot of them aren't doing that.

The Names Worth Knowing

Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), former chair of the House Appropriations Committee, reportedly went missing from Capitol Hill for approximately five months. She was 80 years old and, according to reporting covered in data visualizations circulated widely online, missed a high share of House votes during that stretch.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), 83 years old, has been largely absent from Capitol Hill — and according to Axios, she's eyeing reelection anyway.

These aren't isolated cases. During the 118th Congress, multiple senators also ranked among the worst attendance offenders. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) missed significant stretches of votes during his hospitalization for clinical depression — a situation that at least had a transparent medical explanation. Others had no such explanation offered publicly.

Proxy Voting Opened the Floodgates

The problem has a specific origin point: May 2020. That's when the House introduced proxy voting — allowing members to authorize a colleague to cast their vote for them — citing COVID-19 safety concerns.

According to the Ripon Society, once proxy voting was established, some members "practically never came back to Washington — sometimes not showing up for months on end."

That was written in December 2021. The problem didn't get fixed. It got normalized.

Proxy voting in the House was eventually ended, but the culture of absenteeism it enabled didn't disappear with the rule change.

Both Parties Own This

Absenteeism spans the aisle.

Granger is a Republican. Wilson is a Democrat. The senators with the worst attendance records during the 118th Congress included members of both parties — some running presidential campaigns, some dealing with health crises, some with NO clear public explanation at all.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) missed votes while running for president in 2020, Republicans screamed. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) missed votes during his 2016 presidential run, Democrats screamed. Both sides were right. Voters in Florida and Vermont deserved a senator who showed up.

The position is simple: do your job or resign.

What Mainstream Coverage Gets Wrong

Most media coverage of this issue treats absenteeism as a quirky human interest story — the aging congresswoman, the sick senator, the campaign trail senator. It gets framed with sympathy, with context, with careful language about "health challenges" and "difficult circumstances."

Missing from most accounts: there is ZERO formal mechanism to force a sitting member of Congress to show up.

The Constitution (Article I, Section 5) technically allows each chamber to "compel the attendance of absent members" — but this power has effectively never been used in the modern era. Congressional leadership can beg. They cannot enforce.

Axios reported that congressional leaders have resorted to literally pleading with absent lawmakers — "You've got to come" — like they're trying to get a teenager off the couch. These are the people running the United States government.

The Accountability Gap Is Massive

If you don't show up to your job for five months, you get fired. You don't get to announce you're running for reelection to that job.

Congress operates on a different planet. There's no attendance policy with teeth. There's no docking of pay. There's no automatic trigger that alerts constituents their representative hasn't cast a vote in 90 days.

Vote attendance records are technically public — you can find them through the House Clerk and Senate records — but they're buried. The average voter has NO idea how often their representative actually shows up.

What Would Fix This

The solutions aren't complicated:

1. Public, automatic attendance dashboards — simple government websites that show every member's vote attendance rate in real time, prominently displayed.

2. Pay docking — miss more than X percent of votes without a declared medical or official leave reason, your salary gets cut proportionally. Other federal employees face consequences for not working. So should Congress.

3. Term limits — some of the worst absenteeism comes from elderly members who've been in office for decades and appear to be running on inertia. An 83-year-old running for reelection after extended absences is a symptom of a system with no exit ramp.

None of this is politically controversial if you believe in accountability and taxpayer value. Both parties claim to support these principles.

The Reckoning

Regular Americans who miss work get fired, docked pay, or both. Members of Congress who miss months of votes get reelected.

You're funding this. Your representative may not be representing you. And the system is specifically designed to make that hard to notice.

It's not a conservative problem or a liberal problem. It's a corruption of the basic contract between elected officials and the people who pay their salaries.

Demand the attendance records. Then demand better.