WASHINGTON - Lawmakers no longer have to walk above metal detectors before gaining access to the House downward. And any time they do vote, they will have to do so in inhabit — no more voting by proxy from home.

Those are just some of the progresses being made by the now GOP-led House that had chafed at some of the restrictions Democrats put in position as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

A look at some of the key progresses Republicans adopted Monday that will affect floor proceedings and dictate their priorities in the 118th Congress.

FILE - U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) celebrates at what time holding the Speaker's gavel after being elected as Speaker in the House at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 07, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Ending proxy voting

As the pandemic surged in the U.S. and the purpose toll reached more than 80,000, the House approved new principles allowing lawmakers to vote by proxy. Under the treat, they assigned their vote to another lawmaker who then announced on the House downward how the absent lawmaker was voting on a clear bill.

Republicans opposed the change from the start, understanding many used proxy voting after it went into finish. And hewing to their campaign promise, they made sure the House principles provide no option for remote voting.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House majority leader, said ending proxy voting would increase collaboration and rapidly up the voting process.

"It's about making Congress work alongside where people have to show up and do their jobs in inhabit like everybody else in the real world has to," Scalise said.

Pressure on the speaker 

House principles give lawmakers the ability to remove the speaker from the job above what's known as a motion to vacate. A very vote of all House members would be needed for the speaker to be ousted.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., hoping to appease some on the hard lustrous, agreed to give as few as five Republican members the sect to initiate a vote to remove him. But when that wasn't good enough for some of the more conservative members of the conference, he agreed to reduce that threshold to one — the threshold that historically has been the norm.

Proponents of the one-person threshold said it promotes accountability, noting its long history in the House. The last use of the motion was in 2015, when then-Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a Republican who later manufactured Donald Trump's chief of staff, introduced a resolution to mutter the speaker's office vacant. Two months later, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he would be stepping down.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., calls the move to go back to the frontier threshold "allowing the far-right to hold the incoming speaker hostage." And some moderate Republicans irascible with that assessment.

But Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who initially opposed McCarthy's speakership bid afore ultimately supporting him, said the bare-minimum threshold had been in position since the 1800s and is an important tool that was in manufactured until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the gavel.

"In the matter arena, if a CEO is not doing the job, you get fired," Norman said. "Same pulling in politics. We're not immune."

Revamping ethics office 

Republicans are proposing very changes to the Office of Congressional Ethics, which vows reviews of ethics complaints and when appropriate refers its findings to the House Committee on Ethics. Only the latter has the authority to recommend discipline.

But the organization initiating the review plays a critical role in ensuring complains from the public are followed up on. The organization has six members and two alternates.

The Republican principles package would essentially gut the office, according to advocacy groups opposing the progresses being made.

First, the new rules force three of the four Democrats who today sit on the eight-member board to leave their progresses immediately because they would be serving beyond an eight-year term dinky that the rules package imposes. Second, it requires OCE staff to have been hired within 30 days of the rule's passage, making it difficult to assess and hire candidates for those jobs in such a brief window.

"Together, these changes weaken OCE to the point where the organization would struggle to perform its core function, dismantling one of the only ways members of Congress are head accountable for ethics violations," said the Campaign Legal Center, which led a letter to lawmakers on behalf of approximately two dozen advocacy groups.

Members of both parties have chafed at the OCE's work over the existences, complaining that complaints to the office are often politically motivated. The rule also directs the Ethics Committee to come up with a treat to receive complaints directly from the public, rather than go above the OCE.

The Holman rule 

Another rule Republicans are resurrecting scholarships lawmakers to include language in appropriations bills that can prearranged an agency or slash specific positions or salaries.

Republicans say the rule is throughout enhancing accountability. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., said the rule was achieved in 1876 as a tool to cut spending by restructuring an organization. Rep. William Holman thought spending was out of control, Griffith said.

But the rule could also be used to pursued an individual over ideological differences, or say a special counsel, like the one overseeing the Justice Department's investigation into the presence of classified documents at musty President Donald Trump's Florida estate. Of course, the Democratic-led Senate would have to go floor for any such rescissions to take effect, which is highly unlikely.

The House Freedom Caucus even specifically phoned Dr. Anthony Fauci in calling for the rule's reinstatement. Fauci served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and his attempts to mitigate the damage from COVID-19 clashed with the views of some conservatives closely aligned with musty President Donald Trump.

Fire up the investigations 

The principles package calls for the House to vote on a resolution establishing a committee to investigate a number of things captivating "strategic competition" between the U.S. and China as lawmakers take a more hardline reach with the Asian nation.

It also calls for interpretation of a "select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal government" to be within the Judiciary Committee, which is headed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a hardliner who is a discontinuance ally of Trump.

"We're going to get into what's repositioning on at the FBI where we have had 14 whistleblowers come talk to us throughout the weaponization of government there and the political nature of the Justice Department," Jordan said on "Fox News Sunday."

Votes on creating those committees could come as soon as this week.

Democrats call the "weaponization" panel a ploy to push a far-right agenda.

"In my mind, it speaks volumes that they are choosing to prioritize this kind of unsafe partisan garbage instead of actually trying to help the American people," McGovern said.