Political Quotes

“Mr. President, let me address some of the arguments that have been raised. First of all, on this issue of the Baucus amendment simply doing more than the Johanns amendment or that it is especially friendly, here is what I would tell you. We checked into that and we have an e-mail from the Chief of Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation and he says the two amendments do the same thing--they repeal the 1099 requirement. That seems to be especially friendly. As Senator Baucus pointed out, we are both going to accomplish the same thing; that is, we are going to repeal the 1099 requirement. To get to the issue of this being an unprecedented grant of power to the executive branch versus the legislative branch, we also researched that. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2004 basically gave the Secretary of Commerce the sole discretion to determine from which accounts and in what amounts funds would be rescinded. In other words, the Secretary had sole discretion to decide how to rescind that. The Consolidated Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2008, when my friends on the other side of the aisle were in control of both the House and the Senate, rescinded more than $192 million in unobligated balances available to NASA and gave the Administrator sole discretion.…”