On the recordMay 18, 2012
I thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate you staying late on a Friday afternoon so that the gentlelady from the District of Columbia can have her time; and I can have a little time, too. I know folks often think, Mr. Speaker, that votes have ended at the end of the day and folks have left the Chamber, and you wonder what in the world's going on there in Congress. Why are those guys still down there on the floor of the House talking after everybody else has gone back to their offices? Well, there's a lot of good reasons for that. As the gentlelady from the District of Columbia said, folks don't always get their say in the hustle and bustle of voting on those amendments. It moves fast. It's limited to 2 and 3 and 10 minutes of debate at the time. And so you need some additional time at the end of the day. But more importantly, I guess this is just one of the wonderful facets of modern-day life, Mr. Speaker. You and I are both freshmen here in the House, but they pipe this back into our offices. I always thought when I was growing up, and I suspect you did, too, Mr. Speaker, when you're at home and you turn on C SPAN or it's on the college campus or what have you and you look and the Chamber is empty, you think, What's going on? You don't realize that it's piped through the closed circuit and it's sitting on everybody's television back at home. Because when I got up here as a freshman, Mr.…
