It is more difficult to miss a day in grade school than the federal legislature............FUCK your "great" country....................................


“They could end up as a 30-second sound bite in a campaign,” he said. (Rahall was defeated in 2014 by Evan Jenkins, a Republican).
ProPublica has collected all of the Personal Explanations filed since 2007 — some 5,058 in all, covering 21,176 votes — and created a database that lets readers look up their representatives’ missed votes, as well as their explanations. These statements are by no means required — only one in six absences are explained — but they document a little-discussed aspect of the lives and work of lawmakers, and provide hints at the competing priorities and difficulties of a system that, to many, seems chronically dysfunctional.
The reasons lawmakers cite most for missing votes range from the mundane (travel delays, often due to weather, or remaining in their districts for job fairs) to more personal (the birth of a child or a graduation ceremony or illness). Lawmakers have missed more than 2,000 votes for medical reasons, and thousands more for personal and family reasons.
The record is full of stories documenting the working lives of Representatives: Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, missed a 2008 House vote because she was searching the Capitol for high school students visiting from her district. Jeff Landry, a Louisiana Republican, “completely lost track of time” and missed two votes in 2011. For Ben Ray Lujan, Democrat of New Mexico, an “operational issue” with a House voting machine meant that a 2012 vote wasn’t recorded.