A colleague had to wake up Rep. Blake Moore so he could cast a vote on a tax bill.
[CSPAN] U.S. Rep. Blake Moore of Utah’s 1st congressional district sleeps in his chair during a House Ways and Means hearing
Utah Rep. Blake Moore was caught sleeping during a 15-hour budget hearing early Wednesday morning.
Just before 5 a.m. EDT and deep into an all-night House Ways and Means Committee hearing, C-SPAN cameras captured Moore asleep in his chair during a roll call vote.
After Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minnesota, voted, the camera panned to Utah’s 1st District representative slumped slightly in his chair. After Moore, clearly asleep, didn’t answer, his name was called again and two other representatives behind him started to laugh. Eventually, Fishbach turned to Moore and shook him to wake him up.
Startled awake, Moore voted no — in line with his other GOP colleagues — and then burst into laughter and pantomimed a bow to laughs.
“All my other colleagues were in the back room dozing off; they just were smart enough not to do it on camera,” Moore told KSL.com Wednesday, adding that both his colleagues and his wife had been teasing him about the incident. “[My wife]’s like: ‘I don’t know what the big deal is. He does this every Sunday at church.’”
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Moore’s office said they had “nothing else to add” about the representative’s early morning nap.
During the marathon committee hearing, which began Tuesday and stretched into Wednesday morning, House Republicans voted to extend tax cuts passed during President Donald Trump’s first term and which could add trillions to the national debt.
Moore, who serves as the House Republican conference vice chair, is the first Utahn to serve in House leadership, and the main sponsor in the chamber of the Family First Act, a bill that aims to enhance the child tax credit, a benefit for families of up to $2,000 per each dependent child under age 17.
“If we don’t do anything about the child tax credit in the next nine months, that will drop back down to $1,000, which is pre-2017 levels,” Moore previously told The Salt Lake Tribune. “When you look at the time value of money, that would be a significant decrease in the child tax credit, so we’re trying to enhance that, and it would be part of this larger package.”
Moore added that he was confident that the legislation will be passed as part of the reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to avoid the Senate filibuster and pass budget legislation — including tax cuts — with a simple majority.
The budget process has been a grueling one for lawmakers in the early months of the congressional session. Sen. John Curtis told The Tribune last month that the reconciliation process — along with confirming Trump’s nominees — has been a major reason for the limited amount of legislation passed by Congress so far this year, and Moore said in recent weeks that the long hours have taken a toll on his health.
“My team, they get mad at me if I get them sick,” he said with a laugh during an April interview. “They call it the Blague — the Blake Plague.”