Stephanie Herseth Sandlin: “my good friend from Houston makes a good point, and it is important to note that these were not people fleeing from a…”

“my good friend from Houston makes a good point, and it is important to note that these were not people fleeing from a responsibility but people fleeing to exercise and claim a responsibility that they had under the Constitution and under the rules of the House. These are the rules that I read from previously. They were doing what the rules required to make sure that they had an opportunity to represent their constituents. So they were fleeing to responsibility. They were fleeing and taking the hard road. It would be easy to stay. It would be easy to stay and lose the vote and lose rural representation and make sure that children were kicked off of CHIPs and that Medicare had no funding. It would be easy to say we are not going to respect what the voters did in the election. That would be easy to do, to show up and to vote and to get outvoted. But these legislators knew the rules, they knew their responsibilities, they knew how to act; and that is exactly what they did. And they should be commended for their actions. Now, Mr. Speaker, it has worked out. It did exactly what it was intended to do. It stopped a runaway train. It made sure that something that was about to happen that was improper would not happen. It gave time for cooler heads to prevail. And as they left the floor of the House and broke the quorum, now the Governor, the Speaker, the House, the Senate, and others have had an opportunity to get together.…”