Health Care

Floor Speech

Ms. FOXX. Well, I want to thank both of my colleagues, my classmates, actually--my colleague from Georgia (Mr. Westmoreland) and my colleague from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for their insights and for their sharing of information in this Special Order today.

Instead of going home to be in our districts, we stayed in town today to vote on a bill on algae, which we could have voted on yesterday, but our colleagues across the aisle are twisting arms every minute of every day in order to get votes. They understand that the American people don't want this health care bill that they're trying to ram through and pass. They're trying to be responsive to their constituents, but they're being forced, in many cases, to vote for something by their leadership.

I want to talk for just a minute about two problems here. We have a problem with the bill, and we also have a problem with the process, or the rule, that is going to be governing this bill.

I serve on the Rules Committee. Up until this year, people have always said, Oh, we shouldn't try to talk about process because the public's eyes glaze over. They don't really want to know about that.

Yet more and more Americans have awakened and are paying attention to what is going on in Congress, and I find that people are concerned about the process here because they understand the process is sometimes as important as the substance of what we're doing.

The Rules Committee is the committee here that establishes the rules for debate and the procedure on legislation that's being considered by the House. Unfortunately, our colleagues will not allow the Rules Committee to be covered by C-SPAN, so very few people have seen the Rules Committee in action. We meet in a tiny room up here. Really, there are no seats for the public, or almost no seats for the public. There are seats for Members; there are seats for the press, and there are seats for staff, but there are almost no seats for the public. So very few people have observed the Rules Committee, but it is doing extremely important work in the House.

The Rules Committee establishes the length of the debate and which amendments, if any, will be allowed to be debated. It has nine Members of the majority and four Members of the minority, so they have it stacked pretty good against the minority. We meet at all times of the day and night, lots of times in the middle of the night. Last year, on the cap-and-trade bill, we got the manager's amendment at 3 a.m., an almost 400-page amendment at 3 o'clock in the morning. Then we voted on that bill just a little later on that day.

Well, what is being talked about to get a health care bill passed some people are calling ``the Slaughter solution,'' but I call it the Slaughter sleight of hand. Ms. Slaughter, from New York, is the Chair of the committee, and she has come up with a really, really clever way of having the Members of this body not vote on a bill but say that the bill has passed.

I said a few minutes ago that we are facing a major crisis in this country, a crisis with our debt and deficit, but the more immediate crisis is this very cynical attempt to pass a bill without having the Members vote for the bill. That has never happened in this House before. This is a complete cynical approach to this, and they have to do that because their Members don't want to vote for it because they know their constituents don't want them to vote for it.

They believe they're going to be able to send their Members home to say, Oh, I didn't vote for that horrible bill. I didn't vote for that bill you don't want. I only voted for the rule, or I only voted for this reconciliation bill, and I didn't vote for that bill.

Now, folks, they're trying to go from passing bills they haven't read to passing bills they haven't voted on. I think any high school youngster in this country who has taken civics knows how a bill becomes law. You pass a bill in one House, and you pass exactly the same thing in the other Chamber. It then goes to the President. The President can veto it or sign it. Yet that's not what the majority party is about here. They want a procedural vote that would simply declare the measure to have passed at the moment the Senate passes what they are calling a reconciliation bill.

As I also pointed out earlier, we have no reconciliation process here. We have straight up-or-down votes. The majority rules. Because there are four vacancies in the House, and because nobody is in the House of Representatives unless he or she is elected, as you don't appoint people to the House of Representatives, the Speaker only needs 216 votes. So what we have again is a sleight of hand going on.

You know, I've seen a lot of cartoons representing the President as the Wizard of Oz, and I think that's a pretty apt description. The President and the people in charge here have been talking a lot about this reconciliation bill because they want people's attention on that. They don't want people to pay attention to the bill that has to be voted on in order for it to become law, which is the Senate bill.

Now, a few minutes ago, the majority leader said, Oh, everybody knows what's in these bills. They've been out there for months. We've discussed them for thousands of hours.

That is not true.

What's going to happen next week is the Budget Committee is going to meet on Monday. They're going to pass what amounts to an empty vessel, which is going to come to the Rules Committee. Sometime next week--and we don't know what time of day or night--we're going to execute an amendment in the Rules Committee that will be seen for the very first time by anybody in a position to vote on it. The staff will have seen it, and perhaps those in charge will have seen it, but my guess is they will not have seen it either. We'll be asked to vote on that immediately in the Rules Committee. That's going to be the first time anybody will have seen it.

As my colleague from Texas talked about, and as I mentioned earlier, we don't have a bill from the President. He presented an 11-page set of principles, which he called a proposal, and he has got a 19-page summary of the 11-page proposal on the Web site. There is still no legislative language, and we have to have legislative language.

The Democratic majority is engaging in such extraordinary legislative chicanery to get this bill passed that it is a clear indication they cannot pass the bill without doing that. They don't have the votes within their membership to pass that bill, so they've got to do all this sleight of hand to get it passed.

These people have exposed themselves as willing to abandon the most fundamental element of legislating, a transparent up-or-down vote, in order to achieve an unpopular, partisan objective.

This is very disturbing, and it should be an alarm to every American. This is what banana republics do. This is not what the greatest Nation in the world does. This is not what the greatest deliberative bodies in the world do. The American people do not want this health care bill, and they don't want their democratic process turned on its head to pass it over their objectives.

I said it before: I was ridiculed. I was ridiculed for saying that I feared this health care bill almost more than anything else. I want to tell you the American people need to fear it because it undermines our entire system of laws. It takes us from being a nation of laws to being a nation of people who will do anything to pass their ideological program, and they will go out to attempt to destroy what is great about this Nation, and that is our Constitution and our rule of law.

With that, I yield back.

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