Mitch Landrieu: “I thought I would take the next 15 minutes or so to review a couple points about the tax relief bill we are considering…”

“I thought I would take the next 15 minutes or so to review a couple points about the tax relief bill we are considering adopting. There are three or four major pieces of legislation that the Senate is trying to finish in the next couple of days. One of them is the reorganization of homeland security and the Intelligence Committee. One of them is the tax relief bill that we have been working on for 2 years. There are other issues that this Congress is struggling to get finished in the next few days, but the most important issue to me and the one I would like to spend a bit of time talking about now is the tax relief bill that was put together by many of us, or tried to be put together by many of us, over the last 2 years. That started out for a very good purpose and a very good reason because there was a trade decision made by the WTO that called into question the legitimacy of some part of our Tax Code relative to certain businesses. We had to take some action or our businesses would have been fined through the WTO because the European Union had prevailed in their argument. So our tax writers got busy and tried to fix that. We need to fix it. But what has happened is, we have done more than fix. We have really messed up some things. Unfortunately, inexplicably, and as a grave injustice, we didn't take care of our men and women in uniform.”