Attendance: Can They Just Not Show Up?

Here is something most people find surprising: there is no law requiring members of Congress to show up to work. The Constitution says each chamber "may ... compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide," but in practice that power is almost never invoked. A member could, in theory, be sworn in and rarely return to Washington. Attendance is enforced not by rules but by politics.

Why members miss votes. Some absences are unavoidable or legitimate: illness, a death in the family, military service, or a committee hearing scheduled on top of a floor vote. Members also genuinely juggle two jobs in two places — legislating in Washington and serving constituents back in a district that may be a five-hour flight away. But some missed votes are strategic: a member facing a politically toxic choice may simply arrange not to be present, avoiding a recorded "Yes" or "No" that an opponent could use against them. Because every absence is logged as "Not Voting," the pattern of which votes a member misses can be as telling as the votes they cast.

How it's tracked and policed. Missed votes are permanent public record. Opponents feature poor attendance in campaign ads ("missed 40% of votes last year"), the press covers chronic absenteeism, and watchdog tools — including this site, where you can see each member's attendance rate — make the numbers easy to find. That reputational cost is the real enforcement mechanism. A reader should also read attendance rates with some care: a single rough year caused by a medical issue is different from a multi-year habit, and leadership or members running for higher office sometimes miss votes for reasons voters may or may not find acceptable.

Quorum rules. Each chamber needs a quorum — a simple majority of members (218 in the House, 51 in the Senate) — present to conduct official business. In practice both chambers operate for long stretches assuming a quorum exists unless a member formally suggests its absence, which triggers a "quorum call" that can compel members to the floor. During the COVID-19 pandemic the House temporarily allowed proxy voting, letting an absent member designate a colleague to record their vote; it was controversial, has since lapsed, and remains a live debate about what "showing up" should mean in a modern Congress.

What can and can't be done about a no-show. Crucially, there is no way for voters or anyone else to fire a member of Congress between elections — no recall exists for federal office. The chamber itself can expel one of its own, but only by a two-thirds vote, an extraordinarily high bar that has been cleared only about 20 times in all of U.S. history, the great majority during the Civil War for disloyalty. Short of expulsion, a chamber can censure a member (a formal, public reprimand delivered on the floor) or issue a lesser reprimand, but in every one of those cases the member keeps their seat and their vote. The Ethics Committee can recommend these penalties but cannot impose removal.

That leaves the next election as the decisive accountability moment for a member who doesn't do the job. The Constitution sets fixed terms and bars mid-term removal by voters, so the records that accumulate between elections — attendance among them — are the evidence citizens carry to the ballot box. Showing up is the most basic part of the job; whether a member does it is one of the simplest, hardest-to-spin measures of how seriously they take it.