Joe Barton: “Madam Speaker, we are here on the same issue that we were here on last week when, under the suspension of the rules, the…”

“Madam Speaker, we are here on the same issue that we were here on last week when, under the suspension of the rules, the House tried to pass a bill to delay the digital television transition period from February 17 to June 12. Wisely, the House rejected that on a bipartisan vote. Our friends in the other body slightly changed the bill and did a procedure called hotlining it, which brought a basically identical bill back to the House. The new chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Mr. Waxman, has gone to the Rules Committee and asked that the bill be reported to the floor under a rule, which is not a bad idea. The problem is, this is a closed rule. Now, I want to point out to the newer Members of this body what a closed rule is. It means there can be no amendments. Now, there may be occasions when that's in order, but this is not one of those occasions. There's been no legislative hearing in the committee. There's been no markup in the committee. In fact, two markups have been scheduled and canceled in committee. So we have a piece of legislation. There's been no debate on it in the Senate, it's been hotlined, we had a suspension vote on it last week--which I think we had 20 minutes on each side before we had to vote. And so now we're under a closed rule. So no Republican amendments or Democrat amendments were made in order.”