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.
Read the full report at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.