Nick Lampson: “I want to follow up with what the gentleman from Texas was talking about with the people that decided to stand up…”

“I want to follow up with what the gentleman from Texas was talking about with the people that decided to stand up against such an egregious process, where they felt left out and had no recourse in Texas but to go away from the legislative process long enough to slow things down and let it cool off. Because none of us like to be excluded from the development of legislation. There it affected many different kinds of legislation. It had to do with school finance reform. It had to do with what we have been talking about as redistricting. But the redistricting issue was just one small piece of it. It by itself was an egregious process, where people literally were locked out of the capital building in the State and not allowed to attend hearings. We do not have a closed government in the United States of America, whether it is at the Federal level, whether it is in the State of Texas or any other State in this Nation. We have fought, we have died, we have shed blood to have a government that is open, where we are free, where we can do the kinds of things that we believe in. So when legislators are pushed to the point where they have to take extraordinary measures to get their message across, they ought to be treated as heroes, the heroes that I certainly believe that they are.”