William Tauzin

Even after that 2-year period, senior citizens sign up for a year at a time, so that you choose your plan for the next year. Within that first 2-year period, you can try them all. You can see which one really meets the needs of your…

One of the neatest parts about our plan is that if any citizen is unhappy with the plan they chose, they can move back.

If you believe your State ought to have the flexibility to adopt its coastal zone program to the needs of your coastal zone, then you vote against the Boehlert amendment. If you like Federal mandates and new Federal EPA authorities to…

Let me complete the answer, please. The academy said this is a reference decision, a scientific decision. We are not telling you you ought to regulate all these wetlands. Your amendment says regulate all them if they meet the reference…

The scientists in the study told us what they think a wetland is. Read the report carefully. This is a reference definition. We are not telling you to regulate all the wetlands.

It destroys property rights provisions, eliminates risk assessment cost-benefit analysis, turns it on its head, and forces you to pay the Government to get regulated. What a beautiful amendment. Anybody that votes for this better not go…

I want to thank him and again particularly express my appreciation for accepting the challenge to help us in this investigation, to get to the bottom of this, put a stop to it, then eventually to change some laws in this country so that…

Today, at a press conference here in Washington, I announced a call for an investigation into activities of the Environmental Protection Agency in region 6, Dallas, activities which clearly violated the rights of a citizen in my district…

Finally, on a public policy note, my clients are becoming deeply distressed about how the agency appears to be more responsive to, and to some extent acting in collusion with, representatives of the environmental community with respect to…

I want to remind Members that not all the alligators in America live in the swamps of Louisiana. This is a bad piece of regulation, and I think we have got some alligators to deal with until we wrestle it to the ground.

Mr. Dingell has been committed to the issue of product liability reform for many, many years. This was in 1988 when our committee finally agreed upon a product liability reform bill and produced it for the House, that bill unfortunately…

I do ask him to yield just to say a word thanks, a word of thanks not only to the chairman, who has been extraordinarily cooperative, the gentleman from California [Mr. Cox], and others who have worked with us to moderate this bill, but…

I think a more important statistic, if the gentleman wants to argue statistics, is that the regime of law that they are defending they do not want to change today, according to that Vincent O'Brien-Richard Hodges study, found that…

The answer is that plaintiff has brought the lawsuit and has incurred those costs upon the defendant in a case where the judge has found the lawsuit never should have been brought. That is what fee shifting is all about. If the plaintiff…

The answer is that the judge has discretion to fix that undertaking. He can fix it at $1, $1,000, $2,000 $10,000 whatever it requires to guarantee that in effect the losing party is going to be able to respond to his order to shift the…

This legislation does say now that we are providing a method by which the judge can impose fees upon the losing party if in fact the suit never should have been brought if it would not be unjust to do so and if it would not be…

I would just point out the language in the bill is much improved over the language last year that the gentleman from Texas and I offered. If the language we had in the bill was so good last year, I want to know why we did not get a markup…

My question to the gentleman is this: Why should we say to a citizen that chose a private investment fund to make his investments, "You're going to have a set of laws that relate to you, but if you invest in a government pension fund, you…

What he has done is not made up language. The language is from the latest expression of the courts, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, interpreting the Supreme Court decision in Hochfelder, and what the court…

Reclaiming my time, this is not an additional amendment. This is a substitute for your own amendment. The idea is before I and other Members who support this bill are willing to accept your amendment which deletes language from the…

Mr. Chairman, what happens under the bill is that the property owner who believes he is affected by one of these statutes, endangered species, 404 wetlands or swampbusters, literally goes to the agency and makes a request, am I affected by…

I think we need to again make it crystal clear to the Members who are in their offices listening to this debate, when we defeat this amendment, which changes two provisions of the bill, it changes it from 10 to 20, but also from the…

I suspect an agency might try, but the law says they cannot, and I suspect that a lawsuit would lie against them for mandamus by some citizens, or perhaps even this Congress might want to do something with an agency that wants to violate…

Absolutely. In fact, the legislation specifically says that the agency must provide money out of its own appropriated funds for the payment of these claims and give the agency the right to reprogram money within its budget to do that. If…

If the purpose of the government's action in denying the permit is not to protect wetlands in general for the rest of us, is not really to protect endangered species for all the rest of us, but if the purpose is to deny your right to…