Louise Slaughter: “Mr. Speaker, I will not actively oppose this rule. The agreement that has been crafted with the administration addresses…”

“Mr. Speaker, I will not actively oppose this rule. The agreement that has been crafted with the administration addresses some of the concerns my colleagues and I have with the underlying bill, but I do have concerns about how we arrived at this rule. The process we adopted seems to abolish as irrelevant the committee process in the House of Representatives. This rule throws out the crafted consensus bill reported by the Committee on the Judiciary by a 23 to 4 vote; that is right, a 23 to 4 vote. The Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims heard from a variety of witnesses at its April hearing, including representatives from affected businesses, academia, labor unions and the Labor Department. At its markup, the subcommittee reported the bill by voice vote. The full Committee on the Judiciary, working in bipartisan cooperation, fully considered the bill, adopting 11 amendments by voice vote. The committee report included a letter from the White House commending the committee-reported bill as a good basis for fine tuning final legislation that the administration could support.”