John Shaw: “I think it is a truism, and I have not heard anybody in this House defend the marriage penalty. It is a tax that taxes…”

“I think it is a truism, and I have not heard anybody in this House defend the marriage penalty. It is a tax that taxes people that are married, where there are two wage-earners in a household, more than they would be taxed if they were single. Everyone in this House agrees that that is wrong, and we corrected the situation. But because of a peculiarity in the rules of the Senate, we were only able to do it for 10 years, so we did it for 10 years. Ten years is better than nothing. Now we want to make it permanent. I would say that many Democrats are going to vote with the Republicans in making it permanent. They are not going to turn this over to the Office of Management and Budget. The previous speaker, I think, made a very interesting observation. I am surprised it has not been made many times, at least from this side. Yes, a lot of us did vote for the line-item veto, but the court said that the line-item veto given to the President is unconstitutional because it is giving legislative authority to the executive branch. Whoa, wait a minute. Is that not what we are doing here?”