Jerry Moran: “This, again, is a bill that responds to the American people. The American people think that one of the answers to the…”

“This, again, is a bill that responds to the American people. The American people think that one of the answers to the problems in American is to give the President extraordinary control over the Congress. Well, it is going to pass. But I would like to remind my colleagues of some of the potential pitfalls of it and also to emphasize some areas that drastically need improvement. One of the flaws in this bill is that there is a little-known provision that says that the President can only line-item veto tax provisions that affect 100 or fewer taxpayers. I would submit to my colleagues that the real abuse of the taxpayers' money is not on the expenditure side, it is on the tax side, because on the expenditure side, we have to go through the scrutiny of appropriations committees. Invariable every questionable item gets debated on the floor of the House of Representatives, exposed to the public, that is the way it ought to be, and for the last several years has been defeated. But not so with tax provisions. Those we can sneak in. We sneak into a tax bill thousands of pages, and all it takes is a little line. Hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money is lost because we do not scrutinize what is in this Tax Code in terms of special privileges and because of the very nature of the tax process.”