Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for the customary 30 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule and the underlying bills. I start by, again, mentioning the fact that we have before us, under this rule, H.R. 238, the Commodity End-User Relief Act, and H.R. 78, the SEC Regulatory Accountability Act. I will talk about them in a minute. There are 56 Members of this body who are new Members and who had no chance to participate in marking up these bills in their committees of jurisdiction. Sure, I am back and Mr. Newhouse is back, but 56 people who were in that Congress in December are not here now, and there are 56 new people. Again, a regular order process would allow these bills to go through committee and have ideas and the participation from Democrats and Republicans, who represent, collectively, tens of millions of people in this country, in improving these bills. We did not allow it. These bills just appeared fait accompli in the Rules Committee yesterday. Here we are on the floor. None of the new Members had a chance in their committees to offer them. {time} 1245 In fact, I am not sure where the Republicans are in their process, but Democrats are still finalizing our committee assignments. We have some of them, and the rest will be completed shortly. For Congress to work well, we need to have regular order.…”