Michael Burgess: “Well, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for bringing this hour to the floor of the House tonight. I…”

“Well, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I thank him for bringing this hour to the floor of the House tonight. I think it is important to talk about this issue. It is important to talk about opening the doors, opening the windows on this Congress, on this health care legislation. We have seen this bill now take several forms over the past 12 months since the President was inaugurated. And certainly the bill that we had in committee, and Dr. Gingrey and I serve on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and we had this bill for several days in what is called a markup in committee. That was covered on C-SPAN. People got to see us argue, and Republican members attempt to amend the bill. Not many of those amendments were accepted, unfortunately. But nevertheless, it was an open process. And Henry Waxman, the chairman of that committee, to his credit, did allow a relatively lengthy discussion on that legislation. However, when we left for August and went through the very famous August recess and August town halls, we came back to Congress, I thought we would hit the pause button, I thought we would hit the resets button, I thought we would hit the rewind button on this legislation, but no such luck.”