Dale Bumpers: “I have lost this amendment several times. As you have heard me say previously, this is the seventh or eighth year that I…”

“I have lost this amendment several times. As you have heard me say previously, this is the seventh or eighth year that I have offered this proposal. Every year the specious, absolutely false arguments are made that people don't want any more taxes and that this is a new tax. This is nothing more than a continuation of the unfunded mandates bill we passed here in 1995. All my amendment does is say to the States, as the Supreme Court in 1992 said, if Congress gives the States authority to tax sales by mail-order catalog houses, the States may take the opportunity to make them pay it. You are talking about the Chamber of Commerce types who go to work at 8 o'clock in Little Rock, AR, in Allentown, PA, and Nashville, TN, and work all day long and collect sales taxes on every dime of every merchant on all the merchandise they sell; and some guy has a big warehouse across the State line and can ship that same merchandise into Tennessee, Arkansas and Pennsylvania without even collecting a sales tax. The Governors and the mayors and the municipalities, the council of shopping centers, the council of State governments, why do you think they are for this? Because we are saying, if you want to. If you don't want to, fine, don't do it. But we are saying you now have the right that the Supreme Court gave you to require these people who fill your landfills with catalogs to make them collect a tax just like Main Street merchants do. Why do you think they are for it?”