Senator Tim Johnson (D-South Dakota) suffered a brain hemorrhage last December, and he is now said to be recovering. The people of South Dakota have not been told of their Senator’s condition, but we do know that Senator Johnson voted by proxy in the Senate Appropriations Committee Last Thursday.

While absent from the chamber, Johnson is not allowed to vote on the Senate floor or even to vote to move a bill out of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on which he sits. But he is allowed to vote “by proxy” on amendments to committee bills.

Johnson approved the use of his proxy - as senators often do - when the committee considered a war spending bill Thursday. It turned out that his vote was only needed once, on an amendment to boost Medicaid funding. Johnson supported the amendment.

How did he approve this proxy? This is important, as these matters are important and it gives the appearance of possible impropriety if Chairman Bobby Byrd is given an extra vote on committee by someone not present and who, evidently, has not at least acknowledged to ranking Republican Thad Cochran his desire to give the proxy.


Senator Johnson issued a statement following the vote, thanking Byrd for including in the war funding bill $4-billion in drought relief for farmers whose livelihoods have been harmed by bad weather.

Johnson has been recovering at a private rehabilitation facility since leaving George Washington University Hospital last month. His office has said his recovery is expected to take several months, though he has been doing work from his bed.

We would hope that this is the case, but we have no way of knowing for certain.

According to KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, in a proxy vote, “Johnson tells his staff how to vote. A staff member attends the committee meeting and tells the chairman how Johnson is voting. The committee chairman then registers Johnson’s vote on the record.”

Johnson’s communications director, Julliane Fisher, told KELO:

Some of the committees have rules that you have the right to vote [by proxy] on an amendment in the committee but not necessarily vote on the overall bill coming out of the committee. They want to make sure the senators are around so you can’t just dial it in.

In the Appropriation Committee, you can vote by proxy on amendments but not on the bill coming out of the committee. The only Johnson proxy vote was to keep the drought relief spending in the war funding bill, which is something Johnson would do and something which many of his constituents would expect him to do. Fisher claimed that Johnson’s vote by proxy is “a new step, a new wrinkle and it shows his continued progress and his continued involvement on things.” It’s a hopeful spin, but the average South Dakotan doesn’t actually know what that vote was.

I wish the Senator a swift and complete recovery, and I don’t think its time to actually question his votes by proxy; rather, I have to wonder what Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, and Chuckie Schumer would be saying right now if the Democrats had remained in the minority and Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi) were taking such a proxy vote from a Republican Senator in a situation similar to Senator Johnson’s. I suspect it would have been similar to the skepticism I employed earlier in this post, only several score times more nasty. And I suspect that the media would have been right there with them. We’ve seen them in action as the party in the minority, and I suspect we will again soon.