Max Baucus: “last evening at 8:30, the Senate assembled as a body to proceed to the House Chamber to sit together as one Congress. We…”

“last evening at 8:30, the Senate assembled as a body to proceed to the House Chamber to sit together as one Congress. We did so because every year about this time, we meet to hear the President deliver his State of the Union Address. We also meet together in the House--all Members of the Senate and Members of the House of Representatives--for an address to the Congress, for example, by a foreign leader. We did so for the address last July by the Prime Minister of India. But it is the exception rather than the rule when the House and Senate sit together. Our country's Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, created a bicameral legislative branch; that is, the House and Senate separately. Carrying into practice the ideas of Montesquieu and Madison, our Constitution creates a very separate House of Representatives and Senate, two totally, entirely different bodies. Oftentimes when confronted with the same task, the House and the Senate come to very different solutions. That is certainly the case with the bill before us today, the tax reconciliation bill. We have something called a budget resolution which we take up every year. That resolution gave the House and the Senate the same task. On April 28 of last year, the Congress adopted that resolution, and the conference report was adopted by a narrow margin of 52 votes.…”