Jim Nussle: “Mr. Speaker, we buy and they pay. We buy and taxpayers pay. This is an attempt, in my view, to look for a tax increase.…”

“Mr. Speaker, we buy and they pay. We buy and taxpayers pay. This is an attempt, in my view, to look for a tax increase. That is what this is about, increasing taxes. We should not allow the Senate to impose a rule on the House. Sixty votes in the Senate just makes it harder to jump through yet another hoop in the Senate, and then I suppose one 60-vote hoop is more than enough. But we should not allow the Senate to impose those rules on the House. If we are here to talk about rules of the other body, I could think of some good rules. How about a 51-vote rule for judges? We have got a lot of judges we need to appoint in this country. How about 51 votes? How about a new rule that says for voting on judges, it only takes 51 votes instead of 60? How about a rule for the other body that says all bills shall be debated for not longer than 100 hours? That would be a pretty good rule. Not for the people watching C-SPAN necessarily, who would have to sit through a 100-hour debate, but do you not think one hour per senator would be enough to debate just about any bill? You would think so. But, unfortunately, the way it works right now, it is unlimited. They could take up a bill and filibuster it for the rest of their lives, as long as they could stand on their feet. So, there are a lot of rules that I would like to impose on the other body, if we wanted to talk about imposing rules. I do not want to have the other body imposing rules on us.”