Emanuel Cleaver: “Please. Seniority. I think it would be good if we had, you know, we do not get in much free-wheeling debate on the House…”

“Please. Seniority. I think it would be good if we had, you know, we do not get in much free-wheeling debate on the House floor. So if you feel you want to move in on something, go ahead, and I will let you interrupt, and you can let me interrupt and we will go like that. Let's talk about tax policy. In the United States Congress, since I have been here, we have passed two very meaningful tax bills. We have passed the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Act in 2005, and we also passed the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act. We have to look at where we were, in my opinion. Where we were was we were post 9/11, we had a corporate scandal, we were in the beginnings or in the middle of a recession in our economy, and we were having difficulty pulling ourselves out for a lot of different reasons. With the leadership of the President, we followed through in Congress to pass those two tax relief Acts. I think I would like to go to the numbers and talk about some of the things that I think are significant in terms of the numbers and how it has influenced Americans. I always like to personalize everything to my State, so I have some State numbers as well. For instance, this year, who will gain tax relief? 111 million taxpayers will see their taxes decline by an average of $1,877. Significant numbers. Five million total individuals and families will see income tax liabilities completely eliminated, because we moved the tax, the lowest tax bracket, down to 10 percent.…”