John Shaw: “Well, Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson) first of all, for being so…”

“Well, Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson) first of all, for being so persistent. The fact that that bill is named H.R. 5 shows that that was one of the first filed here, and those first numbers are usually set aside by the leadership to show that these are bills that we really plan to move. The gentleman's having filed that over a year ago to have gotten that number I think really speaks very well of his foresight and his faith in this Congress, and his persistence, in that he filed several of these bills in the past. We had hoped that this H.R. 5 was going to be folded into the Archer- Shaw bill, which was going to be a much larger bill that would have saved Social Security for all time. But when you get into presidential election years, sometimes it is hard to really bring people together and pass good, common sense legislation, as the Archer-Shaw bill is; and it is one that would save Social Security for all time without privatizing Social Security. This is one of the things that really concerns me more than anything else. And I was very concerned to hear the President's last proposal in which he was going to take the money coming into Social Security and play the stock market with it. I think Americans do not want that. That is something that we on the Republican side are going to oppose. And my guess is that the majority of the Democrats will also oppose it.”