Washington, D.C. – Congressman Michael C. Burgess, M.D. (R-TX), joined Mike Emanuel on Fox News’ America’s News Headquarters on Sunday to provide an update on how Texas was emerging from the extreme weather that left millions without power and the upcoming debate on the next COVID-19 spending package through budget reconciliation.

Highlights from the interview: 

Does Texas need to do a better job in winterizing the energy infrastructure properly: “It’s one of the causes, to be sure.… But how in the world, if you’re pumping natural gas, how do you not have energy available to heat your facility? So those are some of the things that are going to have to be asked, to have to be answered. A lot of people want to talk about changing the grid structure. Look [to] be perfectly honest, it would not have made a big difference. The important thing is we’ve got to be able to harden those facilities so that they can indeed deal with cold winters. We have cold winters in Texas. Not many, but we do about every 8 to 10 years we’ll have something like this and every hundred years we’ll have something on the scale that affects the entire state.”

Why do we find non-COVID-19 items in a COVID-19 spending bill: “Unfortunately, that’s one of the hazards of having a bill this big…. Here’s another thing that people are not really focusing on - the Democrats in their rules package this year gave themselves a pass until April 1. They don’t have to go through regular standard order for anything. So, the pressure’s really on to pass a big bill like this before anyone can actually scrutinize it at the committee level and really that’s wrong. We should not do things that way…”

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