Pete Domenici: “it isn't too often in the Senate that a chairman of a committee gets a chance to play Solomon and be fair. But Senator…”

“it isn't too often in the Senate that a chairman of a committee gets a chance to play Solomon and be fair. But Senator Stevens got a chance to do that, and that is what he did in this bill. He decided--and we should all listen carefully--to be fair. Let me tell you the history of half of this problem. The reason I happen to know about it is because I caught the error. The U.S. Treasury Department does calculations upon which the formula is based. In 1994, they made a mistake, just literally made an error in their calculations. Guess what happened? A whole series of States, including the States of the Senator from California and the Senator from Texas, and some other States, were euphoric because they got a huge windfall announced in their formula--a huge windfall. Well, when a batch of States get a windfall, a batch of States get less and I happen to be one of those. I don't get very much anyway, but I looked and said, how could this be? What happened? We had a formula and the money was distributed differently for some reason. Now, for a little while, nobody from the administration wanted to talk about it. But that didn't last very long because Senator D'Amato and Senator Bingaman from New Mexico joined with me and asked none other than the Treasurer of the United States to come to the office and bring his legal counsel.”