PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H. RES. 965, AUTHORIZING REMOTE VOTING BY PROXY AND PROVIDING FOR OFFICIAL REMOTE COMMITTEE PROCEEDINGS DURING A PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY DUE TO A NOVEL CORONAVIRUS...
Michael C. Burgess (Republican, TX) \u2014 2020-5-15

. Madam , I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. prgtoken Madam , today's rule contains a resolution that will really fundamentally change the proceedings of this House of Representatives. Once that passes--and it will, because this House is ruled by the majority--we will then take up a $3 trillion assistance bill. prgtoken It is not the first time this week that the majority have trampled on the rights of the minority. Allowing multiple Members to vote by proxy does not seem like representative government. I, for one, will not give away the vote of the people of the 26th District to someone they did not elect. Governing is difficult, but we sought the jobs and we need to get back to work. prgtoken Far too many American lives have been lost to the pandemic. This novel coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on our healthcare, as well as our economy. There are plenty of things we could have done in the House on the Committee on Energy and Commerce during the last several months which were undone. prgtoken We passed a bill called the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act. This was a good bill, and it was signed into law in June of 2019, 6 months before the pandemic started. prgtoken We could have had a realtime oversight of this bill that we had just passed in the month of February ask the questions: Is it doing what we thought? Are we achieving what we attempted to achieve with that bill? prgtoken Here is a realtime test, a stress test, but we chose not to do it. We had hearings on flavored tobacco and horse racing instead. prgtoken In an effort to show what we should be working on, I wrote a series of hearing request letters this week to the Committee on Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee chair, including work on the Strategic National Stockpile, mental health, racial disparities, provider relief, and testing. We should be working through authorizing committees to improve our Nation's public health response to this pandemic. prgtoken State testing capacity has gotten substantially better, but we must reflect on what went wrong so we make sure that it does not happen again in the future. prgtoken I, frankly, do not understand what happened at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the month of February of this year. We have never really asked the question at the committee level. We should have. prgtoken If we don't understand what went wrong, how do we prevent it from happening again if the virus makes a resurgence, if some other virus makes an appearance? prgtoken Congress, recognizing the importance of widespread diagnostic testing, did take action to encourage the development of testing strategies, and billions of dollars have been directed towards testing in our four previous response bills. But now we are poised to push $3 trillion of taxpayer money out the door, and we should evaluate, we should have the evaluation of what is the current state of our response and our re