Now the way the Constitution is written, if a matter is put to a vote, let us say four or five Members are missing, they may be ill, they may be in the hospital, they may be sick, they may have gone to a family funeral, so they cannot be…

The Senator told me on a vote of 50 to 50, in which the Vice President sought to cast the tie-breaking vote, would not qualify under your proposal.

I say to my colleague we are just being given these kind of bland assurances. ``Surely this would happen. No question this would be done. It is common sense that we would respond.'' Yet I am giving you a real, live, historical example…

I ask the Senator. It says, if engaged in military conflict, you may waive it. Suppose you are not engaged in military conflict but you need to prepare for a possible engagement in military conflict; you need to take actions which will…

I am focusing on the section 5 provision, and its supermajority requirement of the majority of the whole number of each House.

This requirement requires the supermajority in the sense that it required that it be adopted by a majority of the whole number of each House. You see, this is very important, and I am glad we are having this discussion because it is…

I am addressing a situation in which we are not actually engaged in military conflict, but we want to take actions to forestall a military conflict.

I regret the Senator from New Hampshire does not want to address that question. Let me just point out to the Senate that when you really get down to some of these hard questions, the proponents of this amendment just slide off them and…

That has nothing to do with the Social Security System. It is terribly important for the American people to understand this because a game may well be played with the Social Security trust fund, as was just indicated, in effect, by my…

The more you probe into this, the more of a Rube Goldberg contraption it is. Actually what happens is, the more we debate this section, the more you come to understand and appreciate the perceptions and the wisdom of the drafters of the…

Let me bring the Senator back to the very real-life problem that I wish to discuss with him based on a very clear example in history, because what the Senator has just done is what is consistently done here. If we try to focus, in a…

I must say those were the days when there was a degree of civility that prevailed in the workings of the Congress. With the President out of town meeting secretly in New Foundland with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to frame the…

I will tell the Senator. First of all, it boggles the imagination that we are hearing this argument from someone who voted against the 1993 deficit reduction package. All of the situation that the Senator is talking about would be far…

The game that is being played, I say to my friend, is very clear today because the other side has been very clear that they have drafted this in a way that would have knocked out the deficit reduction package of August 1993. Now, I…

That underscores my point even more. If the Senator's answer to me is you can waive it on a three-fifths vote, then in neither of these instances in the Senate or the House for the extension of the draft did they come anywhere close to the…

That is right. You are saying if this amendment were passed, the August vote would have been negated.

If I could say to my dear friend from Utah, the Founders specifically discussed this. They debated whether the quorum should be more than a majority of the body and they rejected the notion that it should be more than a majority. They said…

What is your interpretation? What does it mean? Section 4 says, ``No bill to increase revenue shall become law unless approved by a majority of the whole number of each House by a rollcall vote.'' Take the situation you just described. It…

The point I want to get across to my colleague is that there is the assumption that issues of national security will not be a matter of controversy. In other words, he is saying clearly, if there is a problem, we are going to get these…

It is 261. Are you telling me that a good number of the 202 who voted against it then would have voted for it, so you would have had 261 votes? Where are you going to come up with these? You barely got 203 votes. It almost lost. It passed…

Fully funded; in other words, you can violate the requirements of the balanced budget amendment.

Continued progress on reducing the deficit is sound economic policy, but a constitutional amendment requiring annual balance of the federal budget is not. The fallacy in the logic behind the balanced budget amendment begins with the…

I would like to address the underlying amendment, the basic resolution seeking to amend the Constitution of the United States to put into the Constitution a provision requiring a balanced budget. In my view, amending the Constitution would…

But what you are doing when you show me those charts is you are assuming no action. Just as in 1992, if you assumed no action, you would have shown a chart of great concern. We took action and, therefore, the situation was improved. Now I…

A budget balance over the business cycle would have more rationality to it. It still does not address the capital budget point.