Eliot Engel: “we have seen many Democrats here speaking out of a sense of frustration. The bill we voted on today is a bill of…”

“we have seen many Democrats here speaking out of a sense of frustration. The bill we voted on today is a bill of tremendous importance, and yet all we had was one hour to debate this bill. Many of us that wanted to come down and participate in the debate could not even get one minute's time to debate this bill because the Republicans kept a closed rule, which said there will be one hour of debate, 30 minutes for each side, and no substitute allowed. I did a little calculation. There are 435 Members of the House of Representatives in this country, and if every one of us wanted to speak on this bill with only one minute total time, that would leave each of us a grand total of eight seconds each to speak on a bill worth billions and billions and trillions of dollars. Surely our Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves when they see how the Republican majority has turned this House into an undemocratic institution where the people who are elected by the people cannot even have the ability to speak their minds. We are fighting for democracy in Iraq, but we will not allow democracy on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. For shame. The average American is not stupid. In fact, the average American is very smart. The average American knows that when he or she has a budget they must live within their budget. They make a certain amount of money. They take home that money.…”