Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I take this time to talk about the pending business, which is the tax proposal going into a conference committee between the House and the Senate. As I am sure the American people now know, at 2 a.m., on early Saturday morning, the Senate passed its version of tax reform. The House had already done that. We were working on a House bill. Now the motion before us is to take that bill and send it to a conference. We would be better off sending it back to committee so that we could have public hearings and understand what we are voting on, rather than sending it to the conference committee. I hope, though, that we will take advantage of the conference to deal with the three fundamental flaws that were included in both the House and Senate bills. First was the process that was used that did not allow us to really know what we were doing. As a result, it is my understanding there are numerous provisions in both the House and Senate bills that will not work and will require changes. Secondly, we professed to want to do this to help middle-income families, but, in reality, both the House and the Senate bills hurt middle-income families. I hope that will be corrected in conference. Third--and there is no dispute about this whatsoever--the House bill and Senate bill will add anywhere between $1 trillion to $2 trillion to the deficit of this country. We shouldn't be deficit-financing a tax reform bill. Let me first talk very briefly about process.…”