Steve Scalise: “I thank my friend from Oklahoma for yielding. When we go back to January, as many people have, we knew that it was going…”

“I thank my friend from Oklahoma for yielding. When we go back to January, as many people have, we knew that it was going to be a narrow majority. We also knew that it wasn't going to be easy. How many of us came here because we thought this job was going to be easy? How many of us thought the task ahead of us to address the problems of this country was going to be easy? One thing we did know is that if we were going to finally start confronting problems that had been ignored for years and years and years, we had to change the way this place worked, and one thing Speaker McCarthy embraced from day one is to start making those kinds of changes to this institution, opening up the process, allowing Members to be more engaged, having amendments come to the floor, single-subject bills, doing appropriations bills. Yes, making that happen overnight is not something that happens automatically, but it started to happen, and we are now seeing the fruits of it. Just last week, we had four different appropriations bills on this House floor, four different ones. Now, those bills took weeks and weeks to finally get to the floor, going through an open committee process, hundreds of amendments, each one of them where Republicans and Democrats could bring their ideas. We debated those bills on the floor, some until after midnight where Members could actually participate in the process.…”