John Kerry: “I simply want to respond very quickly to the comments made by the distinguished majority leader who appropriately cited…”

“I simply want to respond very quickly to the comments made by the distinguished majority leader who appropriately cited many items within the legislation that we all ought to support. Indeed, that is precisely what I said in the course of my comments. We do support a great deal of what is in the legislation. But what the majority leader never did, in the course of his comments, was address any of the issues we raised with respect to the health care system, the fundamental fairness, and the issues of contention raised by the President of the United States. He dismissed that rather quickly and cavalierly, suggesting that the President got a lot of what he wanted. Let me be very precise. Of 119 individual tax provisions in this bill, 35 of them are from the President's budget; that is 30 percent of the provisions, not the 80 percent that the majority leader talked about. Mr. President, and of the $240+ billion in tax cuts in this package, only $48 billion, or 20 percent of the total, is from the President's proposals. No one should be misled by the comments of the majority leader to believe that this is somehow a fair division, and that the President, in offering to veto, is not vetoing it on substantive, clear, and distinct differences of policy.”