As anyone who follows American politics even at a great distance knows, Republicans have gone to war against mail voting, early voting, and anything other than showing-up-at-the-polls-on-Election-Day-to-vote-Republican voting.

There’s only one category of voter that Republican members of Congress exempt from their condemnation of long-distance voting: themselves.

Large numbers of Republican House members frequently avail themselves of the rule, adopted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that permits members of Congress to cast votes on issues before the House from just about anywhere. According to a New York Times report, many GOP lawmakers have voted remotely, by proxy, even when the pandemic has had nothing to do with it.

In late June, some Trumpian diehards cast their votes from the U.S.-Mexico border, to which they’d accompanied Trump on an important propaganda mission. In February, a dozen of their GOP colleagues, including Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz, phoned in their votes from Florida, where they were deliberating weighty matters at the annual CPAC conference.

Defenders of these errant electeds might argue that this form of remote voting doesn’t raise suspicions of voter fraud. (Of course, as proven incidents of fraudulent mail voting in actual elections are effectively nonexistent, they shouldn’t raise such suspicions, either.) We can grant these defenders the courtesy of presuming that the votes from "Matt Gaetz" aren’t actually cast by teenage girls. But as almost all of these wandering Republicans voted to fraudulently overturn the electoral verdicts of Arizona and Pennsylvania voters when the issue came before Congress on January 6, they are all in a high-propensity-for-voter-fraud pool themselves.

Nonetheless, their own remote voting doesn’t stop the Republicans from denying that right to anybody else, particularly if those anybodies might vote Democratic.

These guys are giving "double standards" a bad name.