On the recordFebruary 7, 2023
I am afraid we have to dig into the weeds a little bit with Rules Committee process right now. Earlier, the gentleman from New York said that with this rule, the new majority has tied the number of times that more minority amendments were made in order than majority amendments. While I am certainly supportive of minority amendments, that sounded wrong, so we asked our staff to check. They haven't had much time while we have been speaking, but they have already found at least two times that the Democratic majority did this in the last Congress, H.R. 302 and H.R. 963. Perhaps our colleagues need to check their facts. What I do know is that this rule contains the 18th and 19th closed rules of this new Congress. That is already over 30 percent of what we did during the first year of the Democratic majority. So it is more like a return to Republican habits, just like they ran the most-closed Congress in history last time they had control. I am also astonished to learn that it was the possibility of family separation that inspired our colleagues to introduce H.R. 185, when the issue of family separation due to our outmoded, broken immigration system has not served to inspire any urgency to reform that system. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).
