Michelle Fischbach: “I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I…”

“I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am not prepared to close yet. Mr. Speaker, again, we are here during a rule debate talking about this majority's agenda for Congress, and it is funny because Republicans have a razor-thin majority. They have no mandate. A mandate is like you won by 20 or 30 or 40 seats. Republicans lost seats in the last election. Republicans have the smallest majority in nearly 100 years, and so Republicans need every single vote to pass crummy partisan bills like this one. They can't afford to have any of their Members miss a vote. Mr. Speaker, when Democrats were in charge, when I was the chairman of the Rules Committee, we actually put in place proxy voting in response to a worldwide pandemic. Anyone could cast their vote remotely if they had an excused absence. Mr. Speaker, because it is 2025 and not 1725, and we actually can use technology to vote remotely. The backlash we got from Republicans on this was insane. They went out to the press and said that proxy voting was illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is this. It is that. Then, guess what? They did it themselves. Speaker Johnson voted remotely 39 times. Let me repeat that: Speaker Johnson voted remotely 39 times. He voted remotely so he could go home early. He voted remotely so he could visit school kids. He voted remotely for an entire week once. He just didn't show up.…”