Letter to the Hon. Pete Sessions, Chairman of the House Committee on Rules - House Resolution 797

Letter

Mr. Chairman,

We write to express our deep concern over yesterday evening's rule. Both the content of the resolution reported out of the Rules Committee last night and the procedure under which it was considered were extremely distressing. When the Rules Committee takes away not only the few opportunities the minority has to obtain a vote on our proposals but even the opportunity to participate in debate, the Republican leadership of this House only proves the point Democrats have been making on the floor for the last two days: that by closing down the process and preventing the House from working its will, the majority is failing the American people and even putting lives at risk.

On the floor during consideration of House Resolution 797, you failed to yield the customary 30 minutes to Mr. McGovern, which as far as we can recall no Rules Committee majority manager has ever done. As a result, you were able to call for a vote on the rule before we were able to speak a single sentence giving our opinion on it.

House and Senate Republican conferees "negotiated" a conference report that short-changes our country's efforts to combat the Zika virus and, cynically, under the pretext of fighting Zika, contains a waiver of environmental laws for the use of pesticides.

The text of the conference report was made available online at 10:43 PM, just over half an hour before the 11:15 PM Rules Committee meeting, giving Members essentially no time to read a 136-page bill and 113-page joint explanatory statement.

The Rules Committee did not hear any witness testimony on the conference report, inappropriate for such a controversial, partisan measure. No Democratic conferees signed the conference report and they were not given the opportunity to explain why before our Committee sent the conference report to the floor.

The rule not only declined to give the traditional hour of debate time on the conference report but also affirmatively took away the default 40 minutes of debate time that the conference report would have received under the standing rules of the House.

The rule did not give the minority a motion to recommit on the conference report. For a partisan measure on which Democrats had no input in conference, and on which there was to be no floor debate, this was egregious.

The rule automatically deemed passage of a separate concurrent resolution, to change the title of your partisan bill.

The rule contained recess "lockdown" procedures that started on a session day, instead of a recess day. This is unprecedented unless one counts House Resolution 796, reported by the Committee earlier the same day.

You will undoubtedly characterize your heavy-handedness as a reaction to Democrats' push for a vote on bipartisan bills to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. In fact, it is the other way around: we are reacting to Republicans' continuing failure to take up common-sense proposals to protect Americans from more mass shootings and terrorist attacks. Surely the commitment we make in our oath of office -- to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" -- entails protecting ordinary citizens from a wave of gun violence.

Our constituents demand immediate action to stop the killings and, in fact, a CNN poll last week showed that 85 percent of Americans and 90 percent of Republicans are in favor of banning people on Federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms. This week the Republican majority has actively stood in the way of that. We find it exceedingly troubling that the Rules Committee has been the instrument of these failures and implore you to reverse course before more damage is done to our institution and, more importantly, before more American lives are lost. We hope you will return the House to regular order.