Political Quotes

“Judge Bell basically says he does not think this would be a great problem. We do have, very clearly, the ability to determine who has standing. We can say there has to be 30 Members of the Congress, or whatever, so there would not be a proliferation of suits. I add that the court precedence on this--and Senator Danforth is very concerned because of the Jenkins case. But that does, as Senator Hatch mentioned, involve the 14th amendment. The courts have been very clear on what they call ``political matters.'' A great illustration is when a former colleague of ours, Senator Barry Goldwater and about a dozen people tried to knock out what happened on China and Taiwan. Senator Goldwater and his colleagues said this violates a treaty that we have with Taiwan and, in my opinion, he was correct in saying that violated the treaty. But the Supreme Court said: This is a matter between the legislative and executive branch. This is a political matter, and we are not getting involved in that. Just to make doubly sure that we are not going to have a problem, we have this amendment, and we would be happy to have the Senator look at the language. I think it locks it in--and we would be happy to have Senator Conrad as one of the sponsors of that amendment--just to make sure we do not have a Federal judge coming along and saying you have to cut everything 10 percent, or you have to add this tax. We all agree that should not be part of the process.”